Benchmark: Direct gcloud CLI beats Skills and MCP for token-cheap agent deploys
rseroter · x · 2026-10-23
An empirical test compared 5 strategies for having a coding agent (Gemini 3.8 Flash High) deploy an app to Cloud Run by token cost:
- Direct gcloud CLI wins: 428K tokens, 25 turns, $0.1569, 256s total, working AI
- cloud-run-basics Skill: 817K tokens, $0.2435
- Remote managed MCP is fastest: 1.69M tokens but infra deploy in just 24s (5.7x faster), $0.3315
- No-skill baseline failed: omitting --set-env-vars silently disabled the AI while looking cheap at $0.1358
- Local OSS MCP server also failed: burned 2.22M tokens ($0.42) due to a schema lacking env var support
Key lessons: lowest token count can be a trap (silent AI degradation), remote MCP cuts infra time by 82%, and MCP schema design dictates agent capability.
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