Yep. Most MCP servers are best repackaged as a cli tool, and telling the LLM to invoke `toolname --help` to learn how to use it at runtime. The primary downside is that they LLM will have a lower proclivity to invoke those tools unless explicitly reminded to.
If you do like rolling your own MCP servers, I've had great success recently refactoring a bunch of my own to consume fewer tokens by, instead of creating many different tools, consolidating the tools and passing through different arguments.
Case in point; I'm mostly a Claude user, which has decent background process / BashOutput support to get a long-running process's stdout.
I was using codex just now, and its processes support is ass.
So I asked it, give me 5 options using cli tools to implement process support. After 3 min back and forth, I got this: https://github.com/offline-ant/shellagent-tools/blob/main/ba...
Add single line in AGENTS.md.
> the `background` tool allows running programs in the background. Calling `background` outputs the help.
Now I can go "background ./server; try thing. investigate" and it has access to the stdout.
Stop pre-trashing your context with MCPs people.