Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Just to echo the point of MCP, they seem cool, but in my experience just using a CLI is orders of magnitude faster to write and to debug (I just run the CLI myself, put test in the code, etc...)

Related:

Claude Skills

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45607117

Absolutely! I now have Claude Code using `gh` and haven't missed the MCP. (If there are better CLI alternatives, I'd love to hear about them.)

MCPs have a larger impact beyond the terminal - you can use it with ChatGPT, Claude Web, n8n, LibreChat, and it comes with considerations for auth, resources, and now even UI (e.g., apps-sdk from OpenAI is on MCP).

If we're considering primarily coding workflows and CLI-based agents like Claude Code, I think it's true that CLI tools can provide a ton of value. But once we go beyond that to other roles - e.g., CRM work, sales, support, operations, finance; MCP-based tools are going to have a better form factor.

I think Skills go hand-in-hand with MCPs, it's not a competition between the two and they have different purposes.

I am interested though, when the python code in Skills can call MCPs directly via the interpreter... that is the big unlock (something we have tried and found to work really well).

Skills feel so similar to specialized agents / sub-agentd, which we see some of already. I could be under appreciating the depth, but it feels like the main work here is the UX affordance: maybe like a mod launcher for games: 'what mods/prompts do you want to run with?'

I really enjoyed seeing Microsoft Amplifier last week, which similarly has a bank of different specialized sub-agents. These other banks of markdowns that get turned on for special purposes feels very similar. https://github.com/microsoft/amplifier?tab=readme-ov-file#sp... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549848

One of the major twists with Skills seems to be that Skills also have a "frontmatter YAML" that is always loaded. It still sounds like it's at least somewhat up to the user to engage the Skills, but this "frontmatter" offers… something, that purports to help.

> There’s one extra detail that makes this a feature, not just a bunch of files on disk. At the start of a session Claude’s various harnesses can scan all available skill files and read a short explanation for each one from the frontmatter YAML in the Markdown file. This is very token efficient: each skill only takes up a few dozen extra tokens, with the full details only loaded in should the user request a task that the skill can help solve.

I'm not sure what exactly this does but conceptually it sounds smart to have a top level awareness of the specializations available.

I do feel like I could be missing some significant aspects of this. But the mod-launched paradigm feels like a fairly close parallel?