8.7When Token Cost Doesn't Matter

If you're on a 1M+ context window (Gemini 3.1 Pro class), the context-exhaustion argument is much weaker. You can afford MCP's overhead and still have plenty of room.

However:

• API cost still matters (you pay per token — 4x is 4x on the invoice)
• Latency scales with tokens (more tokens = slower responses)
• Quality can degrade with very long contexts (attention dilution)

And one trade-off cuts the other way: reading snapshots from disk adds round-trips, so CLI sessions can be slower in wall-clock time than MCP streaming even while being far cheaper in tokens. Token efficiency and latency are different axes — name both in an interview.