MCP is the authoring layer. Execution should cost zero tokens.

Two posts on Reddit this month independently measured MCP's token overhead. Both reached the same number: 30–40% more tokens than the CLI equivalent. "I added Notion, Sentry and Shortcut MCPs and was surprised to see every session starting off with 40% of the context used." — NoSlicedMushrooms (28 upvotes), r/ClaudeAI "A batch job with 4 MCP servers blew through our token budget in 2 hours. The schema injection on every turn is the killer." — tom_mathews, r/ClaudeAI The "MCP is dead, just use CL