We Benchmarked MCP Against Code Generation. MCP Won (Mostly).
TL;DR: For a small, well-designed API (10 tools), structured MCP tool calls consistently outscore code generation on correctness — 0.99 vs 0.97 — and the gap concentrates in tasks where domain-specific logic matters. Adding a reference document to MCP tools costs 6–14% more tokens with zero accuracy gain. Cloudflare’s search+execute pattern matches MCP accuracy but uses more tokens. With MCP tools, Haiku is within 1% of Opus at 1/12 the cost. ...