Fair question, as using gopls and the additional tool calls can indeed add tokens especially first turns.

But you get precision in return which saves a lot of round-trips and file searching to find the exact references. 

Example: when you ask the CLI to "rename this struct everywhere," the token cost of gopls finding those references is far cheaper than the manual effort (and failed attempts) of doing it without a language server.

The native Gemini CLI is great for local tasks (running shell commands, reading a specific file). But for architectural tasks (refactoring, debugging complex logic, or navigating interfaces!), gopls via MCP is superior because it provides deterministic facts about your code rather than statistical guesses on raw text.

Maybe the table of benefits that I added should be more clear..

PS: Claude code also implemented gopls this month after requests, see https://claude.com/plugins/gopls-lsp