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rossvc | on: Chrome DevTools MCP (2025)
I've been using the DevTools MCP for months now, but it's extremely token heavy. Is there an alternative that provides the same amount of detail when it comes to reading back network requests?
nerdsniper | parent | next
It's probably not fully optimized and could be compacted more with just some effort, and further with clever techniques, but browser state/session data will always use up a ton of tokens because it's a ton of data. There's not really a way around that. AI's have a surprising "intuition" about problems that often help them guess at solutions based on insufficient information (and they guess correctly more often than I expect they should). But when their intuition isn't enough and you need to feed them the real logs/data...it's always gonna use a bunch of tokens.

This is one place where human intuition helps a ton today. If you can find the most relevant snippets and give the AI just the right context, it does a much better job.

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DimitriBouriez | parent | next
i'm experimenting with a different approach (no CDP/ARIA trees, just Chrome extension messaging that returns a numbered list of interactive elements). Way lighter on tokens and undetectable but still very experimental : https://github.com/DimitriBouriez/navagent-mcp
mmaunder | parent
Yes. CLI. Always CLI. Never MCP. Ever. You’re welcome.
flash_us0101 | root | parent | next
CLI is great when you know what command to run. MCP is great when the agent decides what to run - it discovers tools without you scripting the interaction.

The real problem isn't MCP vs CLI, it's that MCP originally loaded every tool definition into context upfront. A typical multi-server setup (GitHub, Slack, Sentry, Grafana, Splunk) consumes ~55K tokens in definitions before Claude does any work. Tool selection accuracy also degrades past 30-50 tools.

Anthropic's Tool Search fixes this with per-tool lazy loading - tools are defined with defer_loading: true, Claude only sees a search index, and full schemas load on demand for the 3-5 tools actually needed. 85% token reduction. The original "everything upfront" design was wrong, but the protocol is catching up.

nerdsniper | root | parent
That doesn't solve the issue here because the amount of data in the browser state dwarfs the MCP overhead.
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