Hacker News Reader

Comment by newman314 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, it appears that using the gh cli is much more token efficient than MCP so that's a plus.

https://medium.com/@ravi.madabhushi/mcp-is-up-to-32-more-exp...

I see benchmarks a lot working on this, and I honestly think there’s too many things to cover in this comment but: - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too - even with the above, talks of the raw token count don’t consider that for very long trajectories the prompt cache amortises much of this cost, and a feature of MCP is you can also customise the tools to a select subset, and that’s powerful - you can add tool confirmations for write/destructive actions trivially - the old training data on CLIs is good but actually for new features the fact MCP advertises them is also a bonus, but that takes longer to see, MCP isn’t that old

There are many more aspects, but even with GitHub MCP, where the agent has a huge amount of pre-training on the CLI, there are still reasons why people use it extensively - you don’t hear it a lot here but suffice to say usage never stopped growing to this day.

I think if CLIs are working for you then good, I also like our cli and did some work on it too, like adding gh skill subcommand.

Do use what works, and measure and improve - but this article is not doing justice to the MCP server IMHO.

> - this article doesn’t enable tool search for starters where tokens start at near zero for MCP too

Is that why I have to constantly remind Claude and ChatGPT that they do have access to a Github plugin that can access my account, instead of trying and failing to use the gh cli?

Most likely, personally I have thoughts on tool search, I don’t believe it’s the final stop on the road to MCP progressive discovery, but it does have its uses. Especially for very large tool catalogues.

Expect more on this. We are looking at the problem.

"claude, stop shelling out to grep, your search tool uses ripgrep and it's faster."

0verload.net ... I am the Author if the tool. I cloned grep and hopped it up a with a bunch of globs and stuff only a bot can really use. You can version control directorys ...its not meant to replace git.. I wronte it for my self because I was tired of wishing it hadnt been a week since i checked into github. I have not have regression at all since I started using it ..its a godsend.it increases the effective context size by a huge ammount..if you learn to use it correctly you can have hundreds of megs of context without a problem and share it between agents. Additionally theres an edit monitor that throws every file and the diff for all the things the bots edit and you cvan scroll thru the sessions edits holding alt down and page thru the days code. ITs meant to be a pair programming tool to use with claude code. I have full mcp support but I also have a more powerful scripting language.mcp support is just part of the scripting language..so is rest..the whole thing is bot centric..I have guis for itm all but you can just tell the bots to o stuff ..I made the bot interfaces for everything and then the gui. Oh..it caches all the memory contexts and all the verson controlled filex in ram so grepping stuff in the source controlled folder is considerably faster..anwhere from hundreds to I have seen 6000+ times faster grep results not thru any sort of black magic..its just what happens when a custom written grep has a in ram

"claude: my harness tells me to use python's pathlib"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com