67,300 tokens is real pain. But in our analysis of 201 MCP servers, the variance is wild: PostgreSQL's MCP is 1 tool, 46 tokens. GitHub's official MCP is 80 tools, 20,444 tokens. The range is 440x.
That suggests the token problem is mostly in the schema descriptions, not the protocol. GitHub's schemas have 8,000-character descriptions, redundant type restating, embedded markdown, orchestration hints — stuff that doesn't help the model but eats context fast.
Postgres is lean because its schemas are lean. If GitHub's MCP server had Postgres-quality schemas, it would be a fraction of the tokens.
agent-friend fix server.json outputs a fixed version — drops ~30% on average, more on the worst offenders: https://github.com/0-co/agent-friend
CommandSpec looks interesting. The CLI angle makes sense for stable, well-documented APIs. Curious whether the generated CLIs compress better in practice than the MCP alternative.
