The Model Context Protocol was supposed to be the "USB-C of AI" — a universal standard for agents to talk to tools. But a new engineering analysis from Quandri paints a damning picture: • MCP tool definitions consume 21K+ tokens before any work is done (10.5% of Claude's 200K context, 16.5% of GPT-4o's 128K) • MCP is 3× slower per call than direct REST API, and 9.4× slower on first call • Direct CLI/API uses 65× fewer tokens for the same operation Full analysis here: https://the-agent-report.com/2026/05/mcp-is-dead-developer-critique/ What's your experience with MCP vs CLI/API for agent tool use? submitted by /u/docdavkitty [link] [comments]