mcp2cli: 96–99% MCP Token Cost Reduction via CLI-Based Tool Discovery

jangwook.net·medium signal

mcp2cli replaces MCP server schema injection with lightweight CLI-based tool discovery, reducing per-turn token overhead by 96–99% vs full schema injection in benchmarks. The project hit Hacker News and is gaining traction as a practical near-zero-cost mitigation for large-tool-count deployments where the MCP schema tax dominates context budgets. The pattern points toward a broader shift: for many agentic use cases, thin CLI wrappers outperform full MCP servers on both cost and latency.