Solo dev cuts MCP tool result from 2.5MB of JSON to 60KB, weighs cursor vs slice trade-offs
OtherwiseWeekend2222 · reddit · 2026-10-13
A solo developer behind the FlightPowers MCP server shares a common tool-result problem: a three-cities-all-of-October flight search returned 2.5MB of JSON. Claude on the web could save it to a file and read through it, but the result card sat on Loading forever.
His fix: most rows were duplicates, so after dedup he returns only the 60 cheapest fares split across cities — about 60KB total — and the card loads again. The catch: the model only sees that slice, so queries about uncovered dates trigger fresh searches that burn the user's plan requests.
He floats better options — a cursor over a cached copy or a resource link to the full result — but suspects models won't reach for either unless the prompt pushes them, and asks other MCP server builders what they did.
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