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Copilot AI commented Dec 14, 2025

🎯 Aim

Reduce token consumption when returning JSON data to LLMs by removing unnecessary whitespace and line breaks from all JSON output.

📷 Result

Token reduction achieved:

  • 18-19% for command list responses (m365_get_commands)
  • 25-27% for pretty-printed CLI command outputs

Example before/after for a 5-command array:

// Before: 649 chars
[
  {
    "name": "m365 aad app add",
    "description": "Creates new Azure AD app registration",
    "docs": "aad/app/app-add.mdx"
  },
  ...
]

// After: 528 chars
[{"name":"m365 aad app add","description":"Creates new Azure AD app registration","docs":"aad/app/app-add.mdx"},...]

✅ What was done

  • Changed JSON.stringify(commands, null, 2) to JSON.stringify(commands) in m365_get_commands tool
  • Added compactJson() helper that parses and re-stringifies JSON output (gracefully handles non-JSON)
  • Enhanced runCliCommand() to detect JSON output and automatically compact it
  • Implemented precise regex patterns for JSON detection:
    • /--output(?:\s|=|$)/ - detects --output flag without matching --output-file
    • /--output[=\s]+json\b/ - handles both --output json and --output=json formats

🔗 Related issue

Closes: #84

Original prompt

This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>Reduce token used for different MCP commands</issue_title>
<issue_description>## Update 1

What we need to do is ensure that if the command output is JSON, or when handling output for the all commands tool which is always JSON, we should trim all spaces and break lines to make the JSON compact as it is returned as text to the LLM.

deprecated

~We use different outputs for different MCP commands
For example getting all CLI commands uses JSON output mode which might be not most effective. Maybe using toon in this case would be better.

For CLI command response we try to ensure JSON. First if all we should always use JSON compact in this case.
Also for some commands like list command types, JSON might not be the best option and maybe we should recheck If using text or csv output mode would use less tokens, or maybe also toon.

Let's research the tokens used for different output modes and decide on the way to go~</issue_description>

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

@Adam-it I checked and toon won't make much of a difference here. I already merged a change that uses csv for list type commands which is better than toon. What we should do it uspade all JSON output mode to make the it to JSON compact

💡 You can make Copilot smarter by setting up custom instructions, customizing its development environment and configuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Learn more Copilot coding agent tips in the docs.

Copilot AI changed the title [WIP] Update MCP command output to reduce token usage Compact JSON output to reduce token usage by 18-27% Dec 14, 2025
Copilot AI requested a review from Adam-it December 14, 2025 08:57
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Reduce token used for different MCP commands

2 participants