It's such a dumb discussion.

MCP is an API with some description. It adds tools to your agent, along with some context.

The (common) complaint is that the principle of progressive disclosure isn't working because all tools, with all their descriptions, are loaded into context right at the start. This is a somewhat reasonable complaint, as the structure makes it hard for the harness to progressively disclose the tools.

This is a fundamental issue with anything that just adds a bunch of tools, whether it be via MCP or HTTP (still sad that MCP won over OpenAI's HTTP based approach).

How might it be solved? Well, we could work with sets of tools. That's pretty much what the CLI approach does: Wait until you need it, then invoke the help command to discover what to do exactly. The caveat of the CLI being that it's a nightmare to secure.

At the end of the day, every capability eats some amount of context because the LLM needs to know when to invoke it.