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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

#101

Post by phlakaton »

darth_avocado wrote: post #95
AJRF wrote: 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.

What if the great boon of AI is to get us to do all the thinking and writing we should have been doing all along? What if the next group of technologists to end up on top are... the technical writers?

Haha, just kidding you tech bros, AI's still for you, and this time you'll get to shove the nerds into a locker for sure. ;-)

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

#102

Post by crowcroft »

AJRF wrote: 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…

Yes, people should be building applications on top of this.

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

#103

Post by deadeye »

AJRF wrote: 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…

I'm not sure what you mean.

What is the "real problem"?

In the pursuit of making application development more productive, they ARE solving real problems with mcp servers, skills, custom prompts, etc...

The problems are context dilution, tool usage, and awareness outside of the llm model.

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

#104

Post by rednafi »

andoando wrote: post #67
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

Writing one off simple MCPs are quite easy but once you need to manage a fleet of them, it gets hairy.

- Writing manifests and schemas by hand takes too long for small or iterative tools. Even minor schema changes often require re-registration or manual syncing. There’s no good “just run this script and expose it” path yet.

- Running and testing an MCP locally is awkward. You don’t get fast iteration loops or rich error messages. When something fails, the debugging surface is too opaque - you end up guessing what part broke (manifest, transport, or tool logic).

- There’s no consistent registry, versioning, or discovery story. Sharing or updating MCPs across environments feels ad hoc, and you often have to wire everything manually each time.

With Skills you need none of them - instruct to invoke a tool and be done with it.

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

#105

Post by mhitza »

gabrielpoca118 wrote: post #83
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.

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.

Please share an example of what would have taken you 3 weeks and with Figma's MCP in an afternoon.

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

#106

Post by vunderba »

tortilla wrote: post #31
vunderba wrote: post #16

Earlier 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.

It's funny you mention this - for a while I was concerned that CC wasn't fetching the appropriate documentation related to the task at hand (coincidentally this was around Aug/Sept when Claude had some serious degradation issues [1]), so I started adding the following to the beginning of each specialized doc file:

  When this documentation is read, please output "** LOGGING DOCS READ **" to the console.
These days I do find that the TOC approach works pretty well though I'll probably swap them over to Skills to see if the official equivalent works better.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

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

#107

Post by koolala »

dist-epoch wrote: post #91
joelthelion wrote: post #54

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.

HTML? Is the main advantage of XML for understandability the labeled closing tags? Lisp has the same struggle too?

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

#108

Post by idk-92 »

crvdgc wrote: post #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…

tbh wolfram alpha was the craziest thing ever. haven't done much research on how this was implemented back in the day but to achieve what they did for such complex mathematical problems without AI was kind of nuts

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

#109

Post by tptacek »

AJRF wrote: 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…

What is a "deep problem" and what was the cadence with which we addressed these kinds of "deep problems" prior to 2023, when ChatGPT first went mainstream?

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

#110

Post by tptacek »

I do think the big story here is how hyperfocused and path-dependent people got on MCP, when the actually-interesting thing is simply "tool calls". Tool calls are incredibly interesting and useful. MCP is just one means to that end, and not one of the better ones.
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