Why I Switched from MCP to CLI

After months wrestling with bloated context windows and flaky protocol servers, I went back to basics — and my AI coding agent finally started working the way I wanted. I was the MCP evangelist in my team. I set up the Atlassian MCP server, the Playwright MCP, the Figma MCP and much more. Then I started actually using them with Claude Code on a real project. I keep hitting the limit on Claude Pro plan with just a few round of prompting. I check the token counter and found out that all the MCP servers have took up almost 40% to 50% of the context window before the agent did a single useful thing! That was the moment I uninstalled everything and opened a terminal. The MCP promise vs. the MCP reality Model Context Protocol arrived in late 2024 with enormous backing. Every major AI provider endorsed it. The pitch was clean: one standard protocol, any AI model, any tool. Build an MCP server for your database and every AI client could query it. No more per-client glue code. In theory, beauti