mcp-context-cost

circleci — context cost

11,912 tokens across 13 tools — moderate (5–15K). Measured 2026-08-16 under methodology v1.0.

   
server (self-reported) mcp-server-circleci v1.0.0
status measured
tokenizer tiktoken / o200k_base
launch command npx -y @circleci/mcp-server-circleci
isolation docker · public.ecr.aws/docker/library/node:22-slim · network bridge · network enabled for package fetch; clean FS, no host credentials
env vars supplied CIRCLECI_TOKEN
canonical SHA-256 f4d995111363bc9a5c220871fb9e4c2d81372ef647572f5f4f19cb5d4bd08bbe
category vendor-official
source https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/mcp-server-circleci

Where the tokens are

tool tokens share description schema
run_rollback_pipeline 1,391 11.7% 1,077 222
get_job_test_results 1,283 10.8% 772 442
list_component_versions 1,242 10.4% 969 204
get_build_failure_logs 1,193 10.0% 644 487
run_pipeline 1,103 9.3% 579 466
get_latest_pipeline_status 1,048 8.8% 582 413
download_usage_api_data 995 8.4% 637 283
find_flaky_tests 910 7.6% 521 326
list_artifacts 870 7.3% 478 343
rerun_workflow 585 4.9% 297 242
find_underused_resource_classes 488 4.1% 282 168
list_followed_projects 433 3.6% 345 43
config_helper 369 3.1% 230 94

Each tool is tokenized on its own, so the parts do not sum exactly to the whole: the array adds its own brackets and commas, and the tokenizer merges tokens across object boundaries. The badge number is always the count of the whole array, never a sum of parts.

What this costs on Claude

Measured 2026-08-16 against claude-opus-5 via Anthropic’s count_tokens (method tools-delta/v1).

  tokens  
o200k, full capture 11,912 the badge number — every byte tools/list returned
o200k, Anthropic fields only 11,755 1.3% of the capture is MCP-only metadata
Claude, same fields 19,164 1.61× the badge number

An Anthropic tool definition carries name, description, and input_schema and nothing else, so title, annotations, outputSchema, execution, and icons are dropped before the request — that is the second row. The third row is the same tools counted by Anthropic, which is larger than the second because Anthropic’s tokenizer is denser on this content than o200k_base and the API adds its own framing (at most 328 tokens of it fixed, measured against a single minimal tool). The two effects run in opposite directions, which is why the Claude number is not a fixed multiple of the badge.

Re-derive it

npx -y mcp-context-cost verify results/circleci/measurement.json

That re-tokenizes the published capture and checks the count and the hash. If it disagrees with the badge, the badge is wrong — open an issue and it gets corrected.

Badge JSON · All servers · Leaderboard · Methodology