Earlier this week @akshay_pachaar summarized a year of MCP-vs-CLI arguing into one sharp line:

"The MCP vs CLI debate. For most of 2025, AI Engineers argued about it. The skeptics had real numbers: Playwright MCP eats 13.7K tokens, Chrome DevTools MCP eats 18K. A 5-server setup burns 55K tokens before any work."

He is right. Those numbers are the steady drumbeat against MCP as a delivery format. If your agent burns 55K tokens just advertising capabilities, the protocol starts to look like a tax.

We just shipped a counter-data point. codens-mcp is a single Python package that exposes 31 tools across five products (Purple, Red, Blue, Green, Auth, plus a cross-product registration tool). I sat down with wc -c and a calculator and got a number I had to triple-check: the entire tool surface, descriptions and all, is ~4,720 tokens. That is roughly 12x less than the 5-server number in the tweet, and about 3x less than Playwright MCP alone.

This is not a "look how clever we are" post.…