Code Mode: Rethinking MCP
What if, instead of giving your AI agent a menu of tools to pick from, you gave it an SDK and let it write code?
In our last post on context engineering, we talked about why every token in an LLM's context window needs to earn its spot. We explored how structural code intelligence beats text search, and how purpose-built MCP tools give AI agents a real understanding of your codebase instead of a pile of grep results.
But we glossed over something important: how those MCP tools are delivered to the agent matters just as much as what they do. And the standard approach to MCP tool calling has some fundamental scaling problems.
This post is about how we solved them. It's about Code Mode, a pattern that replaces traditional MCP tool calling with something far more powerful, and why we adopted it as the foundation of Constellation's MCP server.