Does tool calling in general bloat context, or is there something particular about MCP?

One thing I have read recently is that when you make a tool call it forces the model to go back to the agent. The effect of this is that the agent then has to make another request with all of the prompt (include past messages), these will be "cached" tokens, but they're still expensive. So if you can amortize the tool calls by having the model either do many at once or chaining them with something like bash you'll be better off.

I suspect this might be why cursor likes writing bash scripts so much, simple shell commands are going to be very token heavy because of the frequency of interrupts.