MCP Burns 59K Tokens Per Task

🔥 What happened OpenRouter benchmarked MCP, CLI, and skills on one GitHub task. The MCP server consumed 59,417 input tokens; the CLI just 1,421 — both answered correctly on Sonnet 5.5. 💡 Why it matters The GitHub MCP server's 46 default tools alone add 19,436 tokens to every request — more than many prompts. Tool Search cuts that to under 600 tokens and halves total cost, but only on larger models. ⚡ Our take MCP is a token hog that only pays off with Tool Search. Anyone still loading all tools blindly is burning budget for nothing.