But the flip side of this is that the tools themselves take up a ton of token context. So if you have one mcp it’s great but there is an upper bound that you hit pretty quick of how many tools you can realistically expose to an agent without adding some intermediary lookup layer. It’s not compact enough of a spec and doesn’t have lazy loading built into it

Yes but I consider that just a bug in the agents that use MCP servers.

It could just be fixed to compress the context or the protocol could be tweaked.

Switching to CLIs is like buying a new car because you need an oil change. Sure, in this case, the user doesn’t get to control if the oil change can be done, but the issue is not the car — it’s that no one will do the relatively trivial fix.