I think of it in terms of the individual tools, rather than the server. I have a server with ~30 tools, but I only need one, so I turned the rest off. The official GitHub MCP server is a good example of this, it has tools for everything from creating gists to managing teams, and you might really only need it to search repos or read issues.
And often you just need web access - e.g. Claude knows the Github API very well, and is perfectly capable of using quite a bit of it via curl, and so a lot of the time it's worth testing if the LLM knows how to access something directly before you start adding tools and mcp servers
