Agency22 June 20263 min read
MCP context patterns for coding agents: dump, retrieve, or answer
When you wire project knowledge into a coding agent over MCP, you pick one of three patterns: dump everything, return candidate chunks to rank, or serve the single canonical doc that answers the query. They trade off cost, accuracy, and how much work the agent has to do. Here is how to choose.
Short version: when you wire project knowledge into a coding agent over MCP, you are choosing one of three patterns: dump everything into the window, return a set of candidate chunks to rank, or serve the single canonical doc that answers the query. They trade off cost, accuracy, and how much the agent has to do. For doc-heavy repos and multi-session work, the answer pattern wins on tokens (about 60% fewer per lookup) and on getting the current doc. The others have their place. Here is how to pick.