$100/month for Claude Pro and still couldn't use the MCP tools.
Desktop became unusable. Not “a little slow” — unusable. Notion alone ate half the context window before a single question could be asked. 54,600 tokens just for MySQL tool definitions. A 13-block Notion page returning 5,290 tokens of JSON when the actual content was 146 tokens. Thirty-six times the overhead.
The workaround was a routing system — defer tool loading, engineer around the problem with thousands of lines of workaround code. It worked, but it was duct tape over a hemorrhage.
Then came the insight: the protocol is brilliant. The wire format is not. Every MCP response carries metadata nobody reads. Every tool definition includes descriptions the model already knows. Every UUID burns 40+ tokens for something a 2-character reference could handle.
So Binary Soul stopped working around it and built the fix.
MCP tools make AI powerful but bloated. 75,000 tokens just to declare what tools exist, before the conversation starts.
A deferred tool routing system. Tools load on demand, not all at once. Saved context but added complexity.
A transparent proxy that cognitively cleans everything flowing between AI and its tools. One word in the config. 70-90% fewer tokens.
Once the wire was clean, the next question was: what if the documents themselves were structured for AI? .ember — files that are their own database.
The Grimoire — a B2B spirits platform running entirely on .ember files. 857 cocktails, 73 brands, zero traditional database. Proof that the format works across any domain.
Everything you're looking at right now — this site, the Grimoire, the API — is one Rust binary. Files on a server, served directly as an app. No database. No cloud functions. No framework. The format is the stack.
Legend of Spirits
Before the code, there was the research. 860,000 words across 9 volumes and 136 chapters — the deepest independently published work on spirits. Cocktails, Gin, Mezcal, Whiskey, Rum, Vodka, Wine, Liqueurs, Beer. The domain expertise that powers The Grimoire.
Today, Binary Soul is a portfolio of products built on one thesis: information shaped for the mind that processes it performs better than information dumped in bulk. That thesis has 9 patents and 7 papers behind it.