It's as frugal as your harness makes it. It's just a bunch of tools and a description of how to use them. Most mature harnesses do some kind of tool search and/or progressive disclosure. Many harnesses have some smarts to page out overwhelming results to a file so a model can grep/jq them easily. Some harnesses expose tool schema to models so their results can be directly transformed or even chained in [code mode](https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/).
Frugal is definitely not a word i would use in the same sentence as mcp
It's as frugal as your harness makes it. It's just a bunch of tools and a description of how to use them. Most mature harnesses do some kind of tool search and/or progressive disclosure. Many harnesses have some smarts to page out overwhelming results to a file so a model can grep/jq them easily. Some harnesses expose tool schema to models so their results can be directly transformed or even chained in [code mode](https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/).