Skills and MCPs CAN bloat the context window. Some harnesses do more progressive loading of skills/mcp depending on how many you have. Check your harnesses docs.

Personally, I feel skills+CLI is better, since only the description of the skill enters the context window until it’s required and CLIs should support help flags which will allow you do have progressive discovery.

And a CLI is also easy to use yourself.

Couple of notes on this

First, it matters how well the MCP is written; a well-written one won't be so massive

Secondly, different sessions should load different MCPs. Load only what is needed

Thirdly, if you're finding you need a dozen MCPs, you need to consolidate that into a single service that does the work and then presents a single, unified API (via MCP) to your agent

Finally, start using models with 1M context window limits. I really don't know how people can stand being stuck at a limit like 272K.

I don't have problems on ChatGPT with the amount of MCPs (five) I have. But each MCP can do quite a lot.