I counted my MCP tools and, well, yikes

I use Claude Code in a couple of different ways. At work, I can use Claude Code (Claude-Work) but the difference is it hits the model via Bedrock. Bedrock until recently had a 200K context window unlike my personal subscription (Claude) that has the 1M context window. I would say "hi" to Claude-Work and my context was immediately 53%!

On a random Tuesday, I asked Claude-Work to audit my tools. What was eating the context?

Turns out, one hundred and fifty was the number. Yes, 150. Across all my MCP servers. I had never once looked at the total, because I'd added them one at a time over months, each for a specific reason that made sense in the moment. Nobody had ever said "hey, you should probably look at that list." There's no dashboard. No friction. Thus you just keep adding them.

what an MCP is and why the count matters

Quick explainer for anyone who hasn't gone down this particular rabbit hole. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the thing that lets Claude talk to outside tools. Every MCP server you connect ships a bundle of "tools". Functions Claude can call, like search_notion_page or send_slack_message. It's handy.

I just never looked under the hood until now. Every one of those tools gets its full schema loaded into Claude's context window on every single request. Not lazily, not on demand. On every turn. So a tool you never use is still burning tokens every time you ask Claude to do anything. And with 150 of them, the pile Claude has to sort through before it even starts your actual task is enormous.

It's like opening a recipe app to scramble an egg and the app insists on showing you every recipe it has ever heard of first. Including the ones in languages you don't speak and of course the story about how Becky and her family moved from the big city to the country and only eats eggs from the chickens that live on the property.

When I actually opened up the Notion connector I'd been using (npx @notionhq/notion-mcp-server), I found 20 tools. Fine, Notion is a big product. However, I might have gasped and clutched my pearls when I saw each of those 20 tools shipped its own copy of an identical $defs block with 8 shared type definitions in it. The same schema. Duplicated twenty times. Loaded into my context window on every request.

I use Notion for maybe four things. Search a page. Read a page. Create a page. Add content to an existing page. That's it. Twenty tools, each carrying an identical passport, just so I could do four things.

The Craft connector was worse in a different way. Forty tools, including full schemas for whiteboards, collections, and tasks. I have never once used a whiteboard in Craft. I am a person who writes blog posts in Craft. Why am I paying context tax on whiteboard tooling?

Once I stopped mumbling expletives under my breath and started auditing, the decision framework was pretty simple. First I looked for stuff that wasn't even connecting properly anymore. Then I looked for stuff that was connected but that I never actually called. All disconnected. Nothing mourned. Next I looked for duplication. There were a few cases where I was carrying around two ways to do something I was already doing a third way. Cut out that noise.

The tricky category was the big servers where I actually used two or three tools out of forty. Killing them entirely meant losing real capability. Keeping them meant paying the full schema cost for things I'd never touch. The product brain in me said this is a build-vs-buy question, and the answer is build. If I only use five tools out of forty, I should ship five tools.

I got to work and wrote two small custom MCP servers. The Notion replacement has 6 tools and one shared schema: search, read_page, create_page, add_content, query_database, update_page. That's it. For Craft, I actually just dropped the MCP altogether and used the API. It's not always an option but when it is, it's the path to take.

The servers I kept earned their keep every day. When I tallied it back up I was sitting around 60 tools. A 60 percent cut.

That "hi" to Claude that showed my context at 53%? It is no 27%. That means my sessions can last longer until i type that /clear command.

that's what being free feels like

You know that feeling when you finally put away the folded clothes or clean out your junk drawer? Yeah, that's what this was.

I think MCP hygiene is about to become a discipline the same way managing VS Code extensions became one. Right now there's no friction to connecting a new MCP server, and there's no visibility into what each one is actually costing you, and there's no nudge to clean up the ones you don't use. So people will accumulate them and wonder why their setup feels heavy, and blame the model.

If you're running your own Claude Code setup, go count. I promise you have more tools than you think you do, and I promise at least one of them is loaded twenty times.