Do Claude Skills enable anything that wasn't possible before?
No. They make context usage more efficient, but they're not providing new capabilities that didn't previously exist in an LLM system that could run commands on a computer.
Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
81–90 of 383 posts
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#82This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing
If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads.
People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.
MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wrong problem. It reminds me of those youtube channels that every 6 months say "This new programming language, framework, database, etc is the killer one", they make some todo app, then they post the same video with a new language completely forgetting they've done this already 6 times.
There is a lot of surface level iteration, but deep problems aren't being solved. Something in tech went very wrong at some point, and as soon as money men flood the field we get announcments like this. push out the next release, get my promo, jump to the next shiny tech company leaving nothing in their wake.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#83MCPs 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.
My team doing front end dev extracted a lot of value from figma mcp. Things that would have taken 3 weeks were done in one afternoon.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#84This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…
If that's true, why do leadership, VCs, and eventually either the acquiring company or the public markets keep falling for it then?
As the old adage goes: "Don't hate the player, hate the game?"
To actually respond: this isn't for the median user. This is for the 1% user to set up useful tools to sell to the median user.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#85> LLMs know how to call cli-tool --help, which means you don’t have to spend many tokens describing how to use them—the model can figure it out later when it needs to. I do not understand this. cli-tool --help outputs still occupies tokens right?
This is like MCPs on demand. I've switched a few MCP servers to just scripts because they were taking like 20% of the context just by being there. Now, I can ask the model to use X script, which it reads and uses only if needed.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#86This seems like Claude sub agents. I personally had tried to use sub agents for repetitive tasks with very detailed instructions, but was never able to get it to work really well in different contexts.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#87This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…
If that's true, why do leadership, VCs, and eventually either the acquiring company or the public markets keep falling for it then? As the old adage goes: "Don't hate the player, hate the game?" To actually respond: this isn't for the median user. This is for the 1% user to set up useful tools to sell to the median user.
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Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#88This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…
If that's true, why do leadership, VCs, and eventually either the acquiring company or the public markets keep falling for it then? As the old adage goes: "Don't hate the player, hate the game?" To actually respond: this isn't for the median user. This is for the 1% user to set up useful tools to sell to the median user.
> If that's true, why do leadership, VCs, and eventually either the acquiring company or the public markets keep falling for it then?
If I had to guess, it would be because greed is a very powerful motivator.
> As the old adage goes: "Don't hate the player, hate the game?"
I know this advice is a realistic way of getting ahead in the world, but it's very disheartening and long term damaging. Like eating junk food every day of your life.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#89MCPs 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.
This is a very obvious statement, but good MCP servers can be really good, and bad MCP servers can actively make things significantly worse. The problem is that most MCP servers are in the latter category.
As is often the case, every product team is told that MCP is the hot new thing and they have to create an MCP server for their customers. And I've seen that customers do indeed ask for these things, because they all have initiatives to utilize more AI. The customers don't know what they want, just that it should be AI. The product teams know they need AI, but don't see any meaningful ways to bring it into the product. But then MCP falls on their laps as a quick way to say "we're an AI product" without actually having to become an AI product.
Re: Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
#90This is a fairly negative comment, but putting it out there to see if other people are feeling the same thing If you told the median user of these services to set one of these up I think they would (correctly) look at you like you had two heads. People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest. MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wr…
> People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.
For consumers, yes. In B2B scenarios more complexity is normal.