alt Hacker NewsThe problem with MCP isn't MCP. It's the way it's invoked by your agent.
IMO, by default MCP tools should run in forked context. Only a compacted version of the tool response should be returned to the main context. This costs tokens yes, but doesn't blow out your entire context.
If other information is required post-hoc, the full response can be explored on disk.
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CharlieDigital • today at 12:47 PM
You can do that by using sub agents and only giving specific MCP tools to the sub agents.
This pattern works well with specialized tool sets in general.
I think part of the problem is how these mcp service are designed. A lot of them just returns Mbs of text blob without filtering at all, and thus explodes the context.
And it's also affected by how model is trained. Gemini specifically like to read large amount of text data directly and explodes the context. But claude try to use tool for partial search or write a script to sample from a very large file. Gemini always fills the context way faster then claude when doing the same job.
But I guess in case of a bad designed mcp, there is no much model can do because the results are injected into context directly though (unless the runtime decided to redirect it to somewhere else)