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One MCP server used 18,000 tokens before doing anything. Here’s the workaround.

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One MCP server used 18,000 tokens before doing anything. Here’s the workaround.

Pi spent much of the past year leaving MCP out of its coding agent, even as the protocol became standard across developer tools. Its creator, Mario Zechner, had a concrete reason for resisting it. When he measured the context cost of popular browser-automation servers, Chrome DevTools MCP alone took up roughly 18,000 tokens, or about 9% of a 200,000-token context window, before the agent had done anything useful.

MCP is now built into Pi, but connecting a server doesn’t put all of its tools in front of the model. Pi leaves those definitions out of the prompt and uses Codemode to find tools as needed, call them from JavaScript and return only the useful output.

Zechner spelled out the problem last November. Playwright MCP needed about 13,700 tokens to describe its 21 tools, or 6.8% of a 200,000-token window, and each additional server added more overhead. He was also bothered by what happened after a tool was called. “MCP servers also aren’t composable,” he wrote. “Results returned by an MCP server have to go through the agent’s context to be persisted to disk or combined with other results.”

“Results returned by an MCP server have to go through the agent’s context to be persisted to disk or combined with other results.”

His answer was Bash and a handful of scripts. The model already knew how to use them, so there was little reason to teach it another large tool interface. His CLI-based browser tools needed only a 225-token README, and their output could be piped into another command, filtered or saved to disk without first passing through the model.


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