If this is true, what is the Playwright Skill that we can all enjoy with low token usage and the same value?
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
41–50 of 383 posts
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#42If this is true, what is the Playwright Skill that we can all enjoy with low token usage and the same value?
I've been telling Claude Code to "use Playwright Python" and getting good results out of it from just those three words.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#43[deleted]
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#44Just 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.
Do you have any information e.g. blog posts on this pattern?
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#45Seems similar to Amp's "toolboxes" from August:
https://ampcode.com/news/toolboxes
Those are nice too — a much more hackable way of building simple personal tools than MCP, with less token and network use.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#46Isn't this just repackaged RAG pretty much?
Depends which definition of RAG you're talking about.
RAG was originally about adding extra information to the context so that an LLM could answer questions that needed that extra context.
On that basis I guess you could call skills a form of RAG, but honestly at that point the entire field of "context engineering" can be classified as RAG too.
Maybe RAG as a term is obsolete now, since it really just describes how we use LLMs in 2025.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For me, it’s pretty reliable until a chat grows too long and it drifts too far away from the start where it reviewed the TOC
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#48Just 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.
> and it doesn't bloat the context unnecessarily.
And, this is why I usually use simple system prompts/direct chat for "heavy" problems/development that require reasoning. The context bloat is getting pretty nutty, and is definitely detrimental to performance.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Am I the only person left that is still impressed that we have a natural language understanding system so good that its own tooling and additions are natural language?
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#50We'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.
Is any of it even churn? I feel like almost everything is still relevant, basically everything was a separate card which they're using to build up a house. Even RAG still has it's place
Now wherever they're able to convert that house of cards into a solid foundation or it eventually spectacularly falls over will have to be seen over the next decade.