/github.com
Linear is one of my favorite software finds of the last few years. I’m not as big of a fan when it comes to their token-hungry MCP server though. I recently switched to this (unofficial) CLI and my rough estimate is that it saves me between 5k to 25k tokens a session.
I asked Claude to sample the differences and it came back with medians based on 71 tickets. Note the unit here is characters:
| Operation | MCP | CLI | MCP ÷ CLI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Update issue | 3,061 | 211 | 14.5× |
| Read (no comments) | 3,721 | 2,311 | 1.6× |
| Read (with comments) | 4,531 | 2,615 | 1.7× |
The explanation for both differences is simple and comes down to sane defaults and flexibility, both of which the MCP lacks: get_issue returns thirty-one fields. Those include the issue’s body and status, but also fields like slaStartedAt, slaMediumRiskAt, slaHighRiskAt, slaBreachesAt. The last few are always null in my workspace. The CLI doesn’t return them by default.
For updates, the CLI returns a simple success message while the MCP’s update_issue response is almost as big as the read payload. Neither MCP tools accepts a parameter that makes its response smaller.