Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 383 posts

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#31

Post by tortilla »

vunderba wrote: post #16
frankc wrote: post #10

So 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 f…

How consistently do you find that Claude Code follows your documentation references? Like you work on a CSS feature and it goes to ADDING_CSS.md? I run into issues where it sometimes skips my imperative instructions.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#32

Post by jascha_eng »

siscia wrote: post #21

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...)

Jup and it doesn't bloat the context unnecessarily. The agent can call --help when it needs it. Just imagine a kubectl MCP with all the commands as individual tools, doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#35

Post by simonw »

jngiam1 wrote: post #27

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 wor…

Yeah, the biggest advantages MCP has over terminal tooling is that MCP works without needing a full blown sandboxed Linux style environment - and MCP can also work with much less capable models.

You can drive one or two MCPs off a model that happily runs on a laptop (or even a phone). I wouldn't trust those models to go read a file and then successfully make a bunch of curl requests!

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#37

Post by simonw »

rco8786 wrote: post #20
filereaper wrote: post #11

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.

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.

You don't need MCP if you can instead drop in a skill markdown file that says "to access the GitHub API, use curl against api.github.com and send the GITHUB_API_KEY environment variable in the authorization header. Here are some examples. Consult github-api.md for more."

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#39

Post by matchagaucho »

ActorNightly wrote: post #34

>kills are folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed. I hate how we are focusing on just adding more information to look up maps, instead of focusing on deriving those maps from scratch.

Creating Planning Agents seems to force that approach.

Rather than define skills and execution agents, letting a meta-Planning agent determine the best path based on objectives.

Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

#40

Post by benatkin »

I think Skills might be coming from an AI Safety and AI Risk sort of place, or better, alignment with the company's goals. The motivation could be to reduce the amount of ad-hoc instruction giving that can be done, on the fly, in the favor of doing this at a slower pace, making it more subject to these checks. It does fit well into what a lot of agents are doing, though, which makes it more palatable for the average AI user.

Basically the way it would work is, in the next model, it would avoid role playing type instructions, unless they come from skill files, and internally they would keep track of how often users changed skill files, and it would be a TOS violation to change it too often.

Though I gave up on Anthropic in terms of true AI alignment long ago, I know they are working on a trivial sort of alignment where it prevents it from being useful for pen testers for example.

Post reply on HN