Playwright MCP burns 114k tokens for one workflow. Here's why, and what to do about it.

A recent r/ClaudeAI post measured a single Playwright MCP workflow at 114,000 tokens . Not a complex task — a 7-step navigation + form submission that ran in under a minute. Same workflow as a compiled tap.run : zero tokens. This isn't "Playwright MCP is bad." It's a structural property of running an LLM at runtime versus compile time. Where the tokens go Each Playwright MCP call sends back to the model: The current page's accessibility tree (~5-15K tokens for a typical SPA) A screenshot encoded