How to Save Bloated MCP with Code Mode
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has faced criticism for becoming bloated and less efficient compared to newer technologies like Agent Skills. Despite initial enthusiasm for MCP, many developers are now favoring CLI-based workflows due to their token efficiency. The article discusses the challenges of MCP, including context bloating and the need for optimized schema generation.
- ▪MCP was once considered the industry's 'golden child' but has recently been overshadowed by Agent Skills.
- ▪The bloating issue in MCP's context window has led many developers to switch to more efficient alternatives.
- ▪CLI-based workflows are preferred as they avoid loading large schemas, making them more token-efficient.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://zenstack.dev/blog/mcp-code-mode |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 07:09:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T07:34:57.437Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T07:34:57.437Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ttoJRumk7s_Y |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How to Save Bloated MCP with Code ModeMay 18, 2026 · 9 min readJiashengCo-founder of ZenStack Is MCP Dead Because of Agent Skills? It sometimes feels like AI is not just disrupting the old world, like SaaS, but also consuming its own children in the new one. Less than a year ago, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) was the industry's "golden child", with every vendor and platform scrambling to integrate it. Then, just 6 months later, the spotlight shifted again—this time to Agent Skills, the younger sibling that seems to have stolen much of the thunder from MCP. Suddenly, "MCP is dead" is all over social media, just like "SaaS is dead" before. However, this is a typical social media's nature to use extreme words to trigger emotions and manufacture virality.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Hacker News (Newest)
