Token-Efficient MCP Usage via MCPorter

When working with MCPs that return large payloads—like Sanity queries with full document content or Brain vault searches with entire file contents—you can route these calls through mcporter outside of chat, trim the output with jq, and feed only the compact result back to the model. This avoids the 20–40k token bloat that comes from loading full responses into context.

When to Use This Pattern

Use mcporter + jq when:

• Large responses: Sanity queries returning full documents, Brain vault searches with file contents
• Repeated queries: You need the same data multiple times and only care about specific fields
• Field filtering: The MCP returns 50 fields but you only need 3
• Chained operations: Multiple MCP calls where each bloats context
• List operations: Getting 100 items but only needing titles and IDs

Don't use this pattern when:

• Exploring unfamiliar data (let Cursor call MCP directly to see full structure)
• Response is already small (< 1000 tokens)
• You need the full response for analysis