MCP Was a Mistake. Here Are 200,000 Tokens That Prove It.
MCP Was a Mistake. Here Are 200,000 Tokens That Prove It. "mcp were a mistake. bash is better." — Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw founder I didn't want to believe it either. MCP was supposed to be the USB-C of AI — one protocol to connect everything. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google all backed it. 97 million monthly downloads. 17,000 servers. But then I measured what MCP actually does to your context window. The Setup I connected 10 popular MCP servers to a token counter. Here's what happened before I typed a single word: Server Tools Tokens Injected Filesystem 11 3,847 Brave Search 8 2,103 Sequential Thinking 3 890 Memory 9 2,567 Puppeteer 15 5,890 Postgres 19 8,231 Notion 24 13,780 GitHub 28 12,440 Slack 22 14,672 Google Drive 31 47,293 Total 170 111,713 111,713 tokens. Before your first message. That's not a typo. Connecting 10 MCP servers to Claude means over 100K tokens of JSON schemas get injected into your context window. You haven't asked a question yet. You haven't made a tool call. The schemas are just... sitting there. The Math That Made Me Angry At Claude 3.5 Sonnet pricing ($3/M input tokens): Every conversation starts with 111K tokens of overhead: $0.33 20 conversations per day: $6.67/day 22 working days per month: $147/month Annual cost of JSON schemas: $1,764 That's more than a Claude Pro subscription. You're paying $1,764/year to read JSON braces describing tools you might never use. But Wait — It Gets Worse The 111K is just the schema injection. When you actually call a tool, MCP wraps the result: { "content" : [ { "type" : "text" , "text" : "{ \" file \" : \" app.py \" , \" size \" : 1024}" } ] } The actual content is 38 characters. The wrapping is 47 characters. 55% of your result tokens are JSON overhead. With 20 tool calls per conversation: Schema injection: ~111K tokens Result wrapping: ~18K tokens Total overhead: ~130K tokens per conversation Your $0.54 conversation now has 130K tokens that serve zero purpose. What Garry Tan Was Right About When YC's CE