I think the death of MCP has been greatly exaggerated. I like that I can easily edit the mcp config and use npx to run a "token efficient" mcp server. Finding those is the hard part.

What gave mcp servers a bad name is the way folks implemented them. They just wrapped rest apis exposing too many tools, too much unnecessary data returned from the apis, and not managing the request context...just shoving everything in and blowing up the context.

I've used a lot of terrible ones for sure, and ended up just building my own using strategies that reduce bloat and token consumption.

Open source and self-healing. https://github.com/scottlepp/ultra-mcp-toolkit

folks have caught on to it, but from a service provider perspective it's not as easy to deliver the solution

mcp is basically `claude mcp add <service name> <service url>`

skills require multi step marketplace registration, refresh, then picking the right skill out of *checks notes* 116 skills on the official marketplace + however many skill come with the new marketplace

cli tools may be a bit better, maybe they're there already because you need them to interact with deployment, or they might be a simple `brew add <service cli>`