I've been using Serena MCP to keep my context smaller. It seems to be working because claude uses it pretty much exclusively to search the codebase.
The advantage is that Claude won’t have to use the file system to find files. And it won’t have to go read files into context to find what it’s looking for. It can use its context for the parts of code that actually matter.
And I feel like my results have actually been much better with this.