> 47 tools = 141k tokens consumed before you write a single word

This is the real problem in my opinion.

There are a ton of great sounding MCP but in practice they have too many individual tools and way too much documentation for each tool. It inflates processing time and burns tokens.

I find MCP is the opposite of the Unix design philosophy. You want fewer tools with more options surfaced via schema, shorter documentation, and you want to rely on convention as much as possible.

You don’t want a create file, write file, and update file tools, you want one write file tool with the ability to do all of those things. Instead of ls and find you want your list files tool to support regex and fuzzy matching with a metadata list.

This is based on building these things for most of this year, so it’s anecdotal and ymmv.

As an example rust-mcp-filesystem has 24 tools, many with completely overlapping functionality: `head_file`, `tail_file`, `read_file_lines`, `read_text_file` plus multi-file variants; or there's `list_directory`, `list_directory_with_sizes`, `calculate_directory_size`, `search_files`, and `directory_tree`. I think that whole server could be 4-6 mcp tools and it would accelerate things.