Do Claude Skills enable anything that wasn't possible before?
Perhaps not, but a big benefit according to OP is the smaller number of tokens / context pollution skills introduce v. MCP.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
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Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#72So 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 wou…
In general, markdown refers to CommonMark and derivatives now.
I’d be surprised if that wasn’t the case here.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#73So these skills are effectively JIT context injections. Is that about right?
From the docs:
"Skills work through progressive disclosure—Claude determines which Skills are relevant and loads the information it needs to complete that task, helping to prevent context window overload."
So yeah, I guess you're right. Instead of one humongous AGENTS.md, just packaging small relevant pieces together with simple tools.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#74>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.
I think skills and also MCP to an extent are a UI failure. It's AI after all. It should be able to intelligently adapt to our workflow, maybe present it's findings and ask for feedback. If this means it's stored as a thing called "skills" that's perfectly fine, but it should just be an implementation detail.
I don't mean to be unreasonable, but this is all about managing context in a heavy and highly technical manner. Eventually models must be able to augment their training / weights on the fly, customizing themselves to our needs and workflow. Once that happens (it will be a really big deal), all of the time you've spent messing around with context management tools and procedures will be obsolete. It's still good to have fundamental understanding though!
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#75Hmmm... If skills could create Skills, then evaluate the success of those generated Skills and updating as needed, in a loop, seems like an interesting thing to try. It could be like a form of code creation caching. (Or a Skynet in the making).
The question is whether the analysis of all the Skill descriptions is faster or slower than just rewriting the code from scratch each time. Would it be a good or bad thing if an agent has created thousands of slightly varied skills.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#76> imagine a folder full of skills that covers tasks like the following:
> Where to get US census data from and how to understand its structure
Reminds me of my first time using Wolfram Alpha and got blown away by its ability to use actual structured tools to solve the problem, compared to normal search engine.
In fact, I tried again just now and am still amazed: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=what%27s+the+total+popu...
I think my mental model for Skills would be Wolfram Alpha with custom extensions.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#77MCPs 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.
When ChatGPT plugins came out, I wrote a plugin that would turn all other plugins into an ad for a given movie or character.
Asking for snacks would activate Klarna for "mario themed snacks", and even the most benign request would become a plug for the Mario movie
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68f2a21df1888191ab3ddb691ec93d3a
Found my favorite for John Wick, question was "What is 1+1": https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68f2bc7f04988191b05806f3711ea517
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#78They're completely different things. MCP is a standardised lightweight integration interface and skills are dynamic rules.
That doesn't mean you can't say one is a bigger deal than the other.
If I learned how to say "hello" in French today and also found out I have stage 4 brain cancer, they are completely different things but one is a bigger deal than the other.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#79[deleted]
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#80MCPs 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.
I think MCP servers are valuable in several ways:
- bundled instructions, covering complex iteractions ("use the id from the search here to retrieve a record") for non-standard tools
- custom MCPs, the ones that are firewalled from the internet, for your business apis that no model knows about
- centralized MCP services, http/sse transport. Give the entire team one endpoint (ie web search), control the team's official AI tooling, no api-key proliferation
Now, these trivial `npx ls-mcp` stdio ones, "ls files in any folder" MCPs all over the web are complete context-stuffing bullshit.