> The new models are quite smart, so suffocating their context with dozens of MCPs and skills isn’t necessary like it used to be.
Genuinely curious, how MCPs can suffocate the context? And what exactly do you mean by this?
I have probably more than a dozen of MCPs enabled in my Claude Code (slack, jira, github, many internal ones), and I have never seen model calling into them unnecessarily unless it’s explicitly needed for a task. And in the latter case, well, it cannot do much without the right tools access (MCP in this case).
Skills and plugins are a bit of grey zone, yes, but even there it heavily depends on what you put there. Just plugin loading always takes infinitesimal portion of the context in my experience
Tip: You can see the token usage of MCPs/plugins/skills by using `/context`.
For example, the M$ 365 MCP occupies several thousands of tokens, and there's currently no way to disable it entirely in Claude Code...
To let the model know when to call them, you send a list of it to the model as part of the context. Each MCP contains a description and sometimes each tool contains a description.
superpowers front-load 22k tokens before you even hit send and their context inflation balloons after 500k