I Measured MCP vs CLI for Agent Tool Use — MCP Used 17x More Tokens Per Call

The Setup I've been building AI agents that use tools - reading files, running commands, calling APIs. There are two main ways to give agents these tools: MCP (Model Context Protocol) - the new standard everyone's adopting Direct CLI calls - good old command-line execution Everyone says MCP is the future. But nobody talks about the token cost. So I measured it.