3.8Interview Talking Point

"When we evaluated browser automation approaches, token economics was the deciding factor. Our test sessions run dozens of browser commands alongside code analysis and test writing — with MCP streaming full page state into context on every action, that budget disappears fast. With the CLI-skill approach, page state lands on disk and the agent reads it only when it needs it. Microsoft's own benchmark puts the difference at about 4x per task — 27k versus 114k tokens — and they now recommend the CLI over their own MCP server for coding agents. The important nuance: the savings come from reading state on demand, not from never seeing state."