8.8Interview Talking Point

"I anchor the skills-vs-MCP token argument to Microsoft's own benchmark: about 114,000 tokens for a typical browser task through Playwright MCP versus about 27,000 through the Playwright CLI — a 4x reduction, up to 10x on long sessions. The mechanism is that MCP loads tool schemas every turn and streams accessibility trees inline with every action, while the CLI writes YAML snapshots to disk and the agent reads them only on demand. I'm careful not to oversell it — the CLI agent still pays for the snapshots it reads, which is why the honest number is 4x rather than the 30x you'd get from naive per-step arithmetic. At $15 per million input tokens that's roughly $1.71 versus $0.41 per test task, and across hundreds of CI runs a day that compounds into a real budget line."