token-efficiency
2 articles
Simon Willison: CLI Tools Beat MCP — Less Tokens, Zero Dependencies, LLMs Already Know How
Simon Willison doubles down on his stance: CLI tools beat MCP in almost every scenario for coding agents. Lower token cost, zero extra dependencies, and LLMs natively know how to call --help. Anthropic themselves proposed a 'third way' with code-execution-with-MCP, acknowledging MCP's token waste problem. This article breaks down the full MCP vs CLI trade-off, including a real-world case study from the ShroomDog team.
The LLM Context Tax: 13 Ways to Stop Burning Money on Wasted Tokens
The 'Context Tax' in AI brings triple penalties: cost, latency, & reduced intelligence. Nicolas Bustamante's 13 Fintool techniques cut agent token bills by up to 90%. A real-money guide for optimizing AI context, covering KV cache, append-only context, & 200K token pricing.