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Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

simonwillison.net

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

#61

Post by andoando »

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…

Being able to integrate LLMs with the rest of the software/physical world is pretty cool, and its all powered through natural language.

Were also at the point where the LLMs can generate MCP servers so you can pretty much generate completely new functionalities with ease.

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

#63

Post by simonw »

Seattle3503 wrote: post #56

Maybe I'm just dumb, but it isn't clear how to manage my skills for Claude Code. All the docs are for the web version. Eg I don't know where to put a skill that can be used across all projects

Here's the relevant documentation: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/skills#personal-...

You can drop the new markdown files directly into your ~/.claude/skills directory.

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

#65

Post by ryandrake »

I wonder if this is a way to make Claude smarter about tool use. As I try more and more of CC, one thing that's been frustrating me is that it often falls over when trying to call some command line tool. Like it will try to call tool_1 which is not on the system, and it errors out, and then it tries to call tool_2, but it's in the wrong working directory or something, so it fails too, then it changes directory and tries to call tool_2 again, and it passes the wrong command line parameters or something, then it tries again... All the while, probably wasting my limited token budget on all of its fuckups. It's gotten to the point where I let it do the code changes, but when it decides it wants to run something in the shell (or execute the project's executable), I just interrupt it and do the rest of the command line work myself.

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

#66

Post by brookst »

cheema33 wrote: post #60

MCPs are overhyped and have limited value in my opinion. About 95% of the MCP servers out there are useless and can be replaced with a simple tool call.

Yes, and MCPs also only work as long as you trust the provider. MCP relies on honesty in from the server. In reality, we know Uber and folks will prompt engineer like hell to try to convince any LLM that it is the best option for any kind of service.

There’s a fundamental misalignment of incentives between publishers and consumers of MCP.

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

#67

Post by andoando »

rednafi wrote: post #55

MCP gives me early days gRPC vibes - when the protocol felt heavy and the toolings had many sharp edges. Even today, after many rounds of improvements, people often eschew gRPC and Protobuf. Similarly, my experience writing and working with MCPs has been quite underwhelming. It takes too long to write them and the workflow is kludgy. I hope Skills get adopted by other model vendors, as it feels like a much lighter wa…

What do you find difficult about writing MCPs? I havent worked much with them but it seems easy enough. I made an MCP that integrates with jenkins so I can deploy code from claude (not totally useful cause can just make a few cli commands), but still took like 10 mins and works flawlessly.

But I suppose yeah, why not just write clis and have an llm call them

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