MCP's Fix for Bloated Tool Catalogues Has a Bill Attached — And It's in the Docs, Not the Roadmap
· 8 min read
The MCP maintainers' current roadmap names a problem most people building agents have felt without measuring: a server's tool catalogue is charged to the model before anyone asks a question. Under Improved primitives, the post is blunt about it — "Connecting to a server with a hundred tools means the model pays for that entire surface before the user has asked a single question, and tool selection tends to get worse as the list grows."
What makes this worth reading is not the roadmap. It's that the fix is already written down, in the client documentation, alongside a warning that it can cost more than the problem it solves — and that warning gets far less attention than the fix it qualifies.