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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

#91

Reminds me of xml vs json. Xml was big and professional, json was simple and easy to use. We all know who won...

Funny thing, pseudo-XML is going through a big resurgence right now, because models love it, while they seriously struggle with JSON.

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

#92
post #82

This 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…

Well, we're still early days and we don't know what works.

It might be superficial but it's still state of the art.

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

#93
post #82

This 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…

>> but deep problems aren't being solved

There is no problem to solve. These days, solutions come in a package which includes the problems they intend to solve. You open the package. Now you have a problem that jumped out of the package and starts staring at you. The solution comes out of the package and chases the problem around the room.

You are now technologically a more progressed human.

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

#94
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I still can't believe we can tell a computer to "use playwright Python to test this new feature page" and it will figure it out successfully most of the time!

Impressing, but I can't believe we went from fixing bugs to coffee-grounds-divination-prompt-guessing-and-tweaking when things don't actually go well /s

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

#95
post #82

This 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…

> MCP, Apps, Skills, Gems - all this stuff seems to be tackling the wrong problem

My fairly negative take on all of this has been that we’re writing more docs, creating more apis and generally doing a lot of work to make the AI work, that would’ve yielded the same results if we did it for people in the first place. Half my life has been spent trying to debug issues in complex systems that do not have those available.

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

#96
post #93
post #82

This 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…

>> but deep problems aren't being solved There is no problem to solve. These days, solutions come in a package which includes the problems they intend to solve. You open the package. Now you have a problem that jumped out of the package and starts staring at you. The solution comes out of the package and chases the problem around the room. You are now technologically a more progressed human.

This made me laugh a lot at the mental image. This was my experience with Xcode for sure.

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

#97
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...)

The point of this stuff is to increase reliability. Sure the LLM has a good chance of figuring out the skill by itself, the idea is that its less likely to fuck up with the skill though. This is an engineering advancement that makes it easier for businesses to rely on LLMs for routine stuff with less oversight.

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

#98
I am really confused on how this compares to resources/prompts in the MCP Spec that a MCP server can expose.

I get it no one is using that, but like this just sounds like a rehash?

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser... https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-06-18/ser...

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

#99

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.

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.

Do you mean three weeks of manual work (no LLM) vs MCP? Or MCP vs LLM tool use? Because that's a huge difference.

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

#100
post #82

This 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…

>they make some todo app, then they post the same video with a new language completely forgetting they've done this already 6 times

I don't see how this is bad. Technology makes iterative, marginal improvements over time. Someone may make a video tomorrow claiming a great new frontend framework, even though they made that exact video about Nextjs, or React before that, or Angular, or JQuery, or PHP, or HTML.

>Something in tech went very wrong at some point, and as soon as money men flood the field we get announcments like this

If it weren't for the massive money being poured into AI, we'd be stuck with GPT-3 and Claude 2. Sure, they release some duds in the tooling department (although I think Skills are good, actually) but it's hardly worthy of this systemic rot diagnosis you've given.

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