Matt Linderman

Building and growing software businesses. McKinsey Associate Partner working with tech clients. Fmr. founder and private equity investor

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Anthropic just solved MCP’s biggest lie: that 50+ tools means 50+ capabilities.

The math tells a different story. Users with 7 MCP servers were burning 67k tokens before typing a single character. That’s 33% of Sonnet’s 200k context window gone. One Docker MCP alone consumed 125k tokens with 135 tools.

Tool Search flips the architecture. Instead of preloading every tool definition upfront, Claude Code now loads a search index and pulls tools on-demand. The token savings are dramatic: from ~134k to ~5k in Anthropic’s internal testing. That’s an 85% reduction while maintaining full tool access.

But here’s what makes this actually interesting. They’re not just optimizing context usage. They’re changing what “tool-rich agents” can mean.

The old constraint forced a brutal tradeoff: either limit your MCP servers to 2-3 core tools, or accept that half your context budget disappears before you start working. Power users documented setups with 7+ servers consuming 67k+ tokens. The GitHub issue tracking this had 97 upvotes. People were building CLI tools just to toggle servers on and off between sessions.

Tool Search reframes the problem. The bottleneck wasn’t “too many tools.” It was loading tool definitions like 2020-era static imports instead of 2024-era lazy loading. Every IDE figured this out years ago. VSCode doesn’t load every extension at startup. JetBrains doesn’t inject every plugin’s docs into memory. Claude Code was architecturally behind its own ecosystem’s best practices.

The accuracy improvement matters more than the token savings. Opus 4 went from 49% to 74% on MCP evals with Tool Search enabled. Opus 4.5 from 79.5% to 88.1%. Fewer tools in context means less confusion between similar tool names like notification-send-user vs notification-send-channel.

This is Anthropic doing infrastructure work that doesn’t generate headlines but compounds over time. The MCP ecosystem just got permission to build bigger.

[Matt Linderman @Matt_Linderman]

@elonmusk … and what percent of these 1.1m voters are from TX??🤔

[Sir Doge of the Coin ⚔️ @dogeofficialceo]

The good ending ❤️

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

What an insane week in AI 🤯

Unity AI
AI Antibiotic
Minecraft AI
MIT: Math AI
Picture-to-3D
Google Starline
Nvidia Game AI
Google Flood AI
ChatGPT in Court
TIME: Humanity End
Neuralink FDA Approval
42% US Not Used ChatGPT
Japan No Copyright OK for AI

Here what you need to know:

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

ChatGPT Plugins are a superpower.

But 99% of people haven’t explored them.

I tried out all 134 released in the 7 days since launch.

Here are the top 10 ChatGPT plugins to 2x your productivity:

[Matt Linderman @Matt_Linderman]

@onepeloton big Peloton fan. Encouraged my parents to buy. The delivery guys came today but didn’t check if it worked. Tried a class and got Error B0202. After 3 hrs on the phone, they need to ship a new bike. Will arrive 2 wks after Xmas - thanks Peloton. Terrible :(

[Anuj Magazine (AI&Beyond) @anujmagazine]

Sharing my visual sketchnote of LNO Effectiveness framework by @shreyas

A brilliant concept to raise your effectiveness multifold, worth practicing.

[fast & furious: epistemic drift @wire_mother_]

Bill Gates just surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest person on Earth, with a net worth of $110 billion.

I struggled to imagine this huge number, so I animated some bar graphs that put it in proportion with other points of reference. The scale is quite stark.

[Matt Linderman @Matt_Linderman]

Money doesn’t solve all problems... ~ Dog-walking startup Wag was an investor's dream. Then things got messy - CNN https://t.co/y1sV0d0rgv

[Matt Linderman @Matt_Linderman]

@matthewbarby Thanks for your insightful talk on SEO at #HubSpot ELEVATE today! Sharing a follow up question that many of us had: Should we post our content to our own website or third party websites like LinkedIn or Medium? Or post to all of the above and link between?

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

The current generation of marketplace startups has been incredibly successful. Airbnb, Lime, Uber, Lyft, Instacart, etc. I've been doing a broad survey of the best writing on this topic and wanted to share my list of 20 best links I've seen.

[Matt Linderman @Matt_Linderman]

Steve Jobs @MIT in 1992: "I now take a longer-term view on people. In other words, when I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn't to go fix it. [I ask] what do I need to do to help so the person that's screwing up learns."

https://t.co/y2qrZ5vLRC via @Inc

[MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competitions @mit100k]

DO YOU WANT $100K!? Submit your biz plan application ASAP to the biggest student-run #startup competition, the #MIT100K competition: https://t.co/8rMXBR1ZBd

March 31, 11:59PM: applications close
April 13: quarter-finalists announced
May 7 - 8: semi-finals
May 14: The BIG DAY!

[Jeff Bussgang @bussgang]

How Should Biz Schools Prepare Students for Startups? – Jeff Bussgang and Michael Seibel https://t.co/MTLPiEPx9H @hbs #hbsltv @ycombinator

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

The income gains last year were the largest ever recorded for the 10th, 20th, 30th, 40th, 50th, 60th, 70th and 80th percentiles.

[McKinsey Global Institute @McKinsey_MGI]

In world history, the past 50 years had the fastest--perhaps unmatchable--levels of growth http://t.co/HLV9s5Hg6q http://t.co/8NKVBW7Hxj