Are they though? Will they always be? Is it in their interest to be efficient?

Fair enough

I don't know about Codex, but Claude Code defers loading tools if their definitions exceed 10% of the context, https://code.claude.com/docs/en/mcp#how-it-works.

I've never thought about it, I just assumed that Anthropic cares about me :) Thank you for this link. That link proves that basic agents have a token optimization mechanism.

Good point - Claude Code does defer tool loading when definitions exceed 10% of context. That helps a lot.

But they are solving different problems. Deferred loading is "don't load tools until you need them." mcptoon is "when you do load them, the listing is 5x smaller." They are complementary - you can defer loading AND compress what gets loaded.

The scenario where mcptoon helps most is when you actually need all your tools loaded (e.g., a coding session where the agent might call any of 96 tools). Claude Code's deferral would not kick in if you are actively using tools from all 5 servers.

Thank you for the explanation. I've never encountered this scenario yet. I only have the Playwright MCP