> Context Bloat: Using a skill often requires loading the entire SKILL.md into the LLM’s context window, rather than just exposing the single tool signature it needs. It’s like forcing someone to read the entire car’s owner’s manual when all they want to do is call car.turn_on().
MCP has severe context bloat just by starting a thread. If harnesses were smart enough to, during install time, summarize the tools provided by a MCP server (rather than dumping the whole thing in context), it would be better. But a worse problem is that the output of MCP goes straight into the context of the agent, rather than being piped somewhere else
A solution is to have the agent run a cli tool to access mcp services. That way the agent can filter the output with jq, store it in a file for analysis later, etc
MCP has severe context bloat just by starting a thread. If harnesses were smart enough to, during install time, summarize the tools provided by a MCP server (rather than dumping the whole thing in context), it would be better. But a worse problem is that the output of MCP goes straight into the context of the agent, rather than being piped somewhere else
A solution is to have the agent run a cli tool to access mcp services. That way the agent can filter the output with jq, store it in a file for analysis later, etc