Monty’s overhead is so low that, assuming we get the security / capabilities tradeoff right (Samuel can comment on this more), you could always have it enabled on your agents with basically no downsides, which can’t be said for many other code execution sandboxes which are often over-kill for the code mode use case anyway.
For those not familiar with the concept, the idea is that in “traditional” LLM tool calling, the entire (MCP) tool result is sent back to the LLM, even if it just needs a few fields, or is going to pass the return value into another tool without needing to see (all of) the intermediate value. Every step that depends on results from an earlier step requires a new LLM turn, limiting parallelism and adding a lot of overhead, expensive token usage, and context window bloat.
With code mode, the LLM can chain tool calls, pull out specific fields, and run entire algorithms using tools with only the necessary parts of the result (or errors) going back to the LLM.
These posts by Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode/ and Anthropic: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us... explain the concept and its advantages in more detail.
You guys and astral are my favorite groups in the python ecosystem
Yes, I was also thinking.. y MCP den
But even my simple class project reveals this. You actually do want a simple tool wrapper layer (abstraction) over every API. It doesn't even need to be an API. It can be a calculator that doesn't reach out anywhere.
as the article puts it: "MCP makes tools uniform"
In hindsight, it's pretty funny and obvious