We've just started to roll out our MCP Servers and if Anthropic and the community has already moved on, we'll wait till all this churn subsides till switching over next time.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
11–20 of 383 posts
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#12Isn't this just repackaged RAG pretty much?
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#13So far I am in the skeptic camp on this. I don't see it adding a lot of value to my current claude code workflow which already includes specialized agents and a custom mcp to search indexed mkdocs sites that effectively cover the kinds of things I would include in these skills file. Maybe it winds up being a simpler, more organized way to do some of this, but I am not particularly excited right now. I also think "ski…
That's exactly what it is - formalizing and creating a standard induces efficiency. Along with things like AGENTS.md, it's all about standardization.
What bugs me: if we're optimizing for LLM efficiency, we should use structured schemas like JSON. I understand the thinking about Markdown being a happy medium between human/computer understanding but Markdown is non-deterministic for parsing. Highly structured data would be more reliable for programmatic consumption while still being readable.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#14So far I am in the skeptic camp on this. I don't see it adding a lot of value to my current claude code workflow which already includes specialized agents and a custom mcp to search indexed mkdocs sites that effectively cover the kinds of things I would include in these skills file. Maybe it winds up being a simpler, more organized way to do some of this, but I am not particularly excited right now. I also think "ski…
I manually select my context* (like a caveman) and clear it often. I feel like I have a bit more control and grounding this way.
*I use a TUI to manage the context.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#15I just read this seperately through Google Discover, and I don't quite get amazing newness of it - if anything, it feels to me like of an abstraction of MCP - there is nothing I see here that couldnt be replaced by a series of MCP tools - for example, the author mentions "a current trick" often used is including a markdown file with details / instructions around a task - this can be handled with an mcp server prompt…
a skill is a markdown & yaml file on your filesystem. an MCP server is accessed over http, and defines a way to authenicate users.
if you're running an MCP file just to expose local filesystem resources, then it's probably obsolete. but skills don't cover a lot of the functionality that MCP offers.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#16So far I am in the skeptic camp on this. I don't see it adding a lot of value to my current claude code workflow which already includes specialized agents and a custom mcp to search indexed mkdocs sites that effectively cover the kinds of things I would include in these skills file. Maybe it winds up being a simpler, more organized way to do some of this, but I am not particularly excited right now. I also think "ski…
I'm inclined to agree. I've read through the Skill docs and it looks like something I've been doing all along - though I informally referred to it as the "Table of Contents" approach.
Over time I would systematically create separate specialized docs around certain topics and link them in my CLAUDE.md file but noticeably without using the "@" symbol which to my understanding always causes CLAUDE to ingest the linked files resulting in unnecessarily bloating your prompt context.
So my CLAUDE md file would have a header section like this:
# Documentation References
- When adding CSS, refer to: docs/ADDING_CSS.md
- When adding or incorporating images, refer to: docs/ADDING_IMAGES.md
- When persisting data for the user, refer to: docs/STORAGE_MANAGER.md
- When adding logging information, refer to: docs/LOGGER.md
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#17So far I am in the skeptic camp on this. I don't see it adding a lot of value to my current claude code workflow which already includes specialized agents and a custom mcp to search indexed mkdocs sites that effectively cover the kinds of things I would include in these skills file. Maybe it winds up being a simpler, more organized way to do some of this, but I am not particularly excited right now. I also think "ski…
if you've ever worked with Excel + Python, I think this example will drive home the value a bit:
https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/document-skil...
There are many edge cases when writing / reading Excel files with Python and this nails many of them.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#18So these skills are effectively JIT context injections. Is that about right?
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
but why can't I do the same with mcp? I just create a help() function that returns the help info?
That hypothetical might be fine, but MCPs do much more than that and their catalogs can be enormous. Here are some popular MCPs and the amount of context they eat before you've done anything with them: • Linear: 23 tools (~12,935 tokens) • JetBrains: 20 tools (~12,252 tokens) • Playwright: 21 tools (~9,804 tokens)
Github: 39 tools, 30K. I had to disable it.
Does anybody have a good SKILLS.md file we can study?
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#20We've just started to roll out our MCP Servers and if Anthropic and the community has already moved on, we'll wait till all this churn subsides till switching over next time.
I don’t really see how this replaces MCP tbh.
MCP gives the LLM access you your APIs. These skills are just text files with context about how to perform specific tasks.