> You sit down and 10 menus (MCP tool definitions) are spread across the table
> There's no room left for actual food (your work)
> Every time you order, the menus have to be pulled out again
This is a bad analogy. Ordering repeatedly is uncommon except for tapas restaurants. You could easily put food on top of menus, but more commonly, menus are removed after ordering, thereby freeing the table (context??) for the food. If you're going to try to explain things by analogy, it's worth putting effort into making it more relevant.
For this example, there seems to be no explanation for the LLM to know when to use this curl command, etc. Is the idea that the linear API is known in the LLM weights already and therefore there is no need to include "the manual" in the context window? If so, it's a pretty narrow win.
> Update: Since these measurements were taken, Claude Code has rolled out Tool Search with Deferred Loading, which loads MCP tool schemas on-demand and reduces context usage by 85%+. The context bloat described in Problem 1 is largely addressed for users on current Claude Code versions. The performance, debugging, and architectural arguments below still apply.
Because Claude Code only loads the tools it needs now, so context bloat is pretty much solved for MCPs.
The problems listed on the article are problems with specific tools that have large tool descriptions. This has nothing to do with MCP. There is nothing in MCP that would cause the tool descriptions to use more context than they would otherwise.
If you have external users, then you have to use MCP, which comes with how to use each endpoint and etc. MCP is what their current apps e.g. Cowork, Cursor support out-of-the-box.
In that sense, MCP is very much not dead
You can have your IT department configure an MCP for the org, and your regular non-technical users click a button and login with their account the service. Then they get all the tool calls authenticated as themselves.
Sooner or later you have to build the real thing, and the cost and slowness of token-based computation become unacceptable.
It's also easier to manage for non-tech people. Try telling the people over at HR or finance to install a CLI.
In my opinion, MCP is not dead. "MCP Belongs to Software Engineering", it ships existing concepts from software engineering into AI. CLI, MCP-tools, and OpenAPI are interchangeable to some degree, but MCP is more than tools; there are mcp-apps[2], lazy load in context[3].
[1]: https://log.ifor.dev/posts/mcp_vs_skill/
[2]: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/extensions/apps/overview