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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

#111

Post by mooreds »

Reposting a comment I made when it was posted 10 hours ago:

As someone who is looking into MCP right now, I'd love to hear what folks with experience in both of these areas think.

My first impressions are that MCP has some advantages:

- around for longer and has some momentum

- doesn't require a dev envt on the computer to be effective

- cross-vendor support

- more sophistication for complex use cases (enterprise permissions can be layered on because of OAuth support)

- multiple transport layers gives flexibility

Skills seems to have advantages too, of course:

- simpler

- easier to iterate

- less context used

I think if the other vendors follow along with skills, and we expect every computer to have access to a development environment, skills could win the day. HTML won over XML and REST won over SOAP, so simple often wins.

But the biggest drawback of MCP, the context window overuse, can be remediated by having MCP specific sub-agents that are interacted with using a primary agent, rather than injecting each MCP server into the main context.

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

#112

Post by simonw »

tptacek wrote: post #110

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.

I think MCP's huge adoption was mainly due to its timing.

Tool calling was a thing before MCP, but the models weren't very good at it. MCP almost exactly coincided with the models getting good enough at tool calling for it to be interesting.

So yeah, I agree - most of the MCP excitement was people learning that LLMs can call tools to interact with other systems.

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

#113

Post by simonw »

arjunchint wrote: post #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...

Skills are massively easier to understand and implement than MCP resources/prompts.

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

#114

Post by XenophileJKO »

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.

This is true, but the reason the economics have inverted is that we can pay these new "people" <$20 for the human equivalent of ~300 hours worth of non-stop typing.

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

#115

Post by _pdp_ »

These are completely different things. MCP is also about consuming external services handling oauth and all of that. Skills are effectively cli tools + prompts. Completely different application so they cannot be compared easily like that.

BTW, before even MCP was a thing we invented our own system that is called Skillset. Turns out now it is sort of the best parts of both MCPs and Skills.

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

#116

Post by simonw »

mooreds wrote: post #111

Reposting a comment I made when it was posted 10 hours ago: As someone who is looking into MCP right now, I'd love to hear what folks with experience in both of these areas think. My first impressions are that MCP has some advantages: - around for longer and has some momentum - doesn't require a dev envt on the computer to be effective - cross-vendor support - more sophistication for complex use cases (enterprise per…

Yeah, I think you're exactly right about MCP's advantages - especially that MCP doesn't require access a full sandboxed Linux environment to work!

I still plan to ship an MCP for one of my products to let it interact with the wider ecosystem, but as an end-user I'm going to continue mostly using Claude Code without them.

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

#117

Post by FireInsight »

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…

When clicking your link, for me it opened the following query on Wolfram Alpha: `what%27s the total population of the United States%3F`

Funnily enough, this was the result: `6.1% mod 3 °F (degrees Fahrenheit) (2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-year estimates)`

I wonder how that was calculated...

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

#118

Post by solsane »

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 do not feel the same way. This looks easy to use and useful. I don’t think every problem needs to be a ‘deep problem’. There’s so many practical steps to get to

> People want to log in to an account, tell the thing to do something, and the system figures out the rest.

At a glance, this seems to be a practical approach to building up a personalized prompting stack based on the things I commonly do.

I’m excited about it.

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

#119

Post by throwaway127482 »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #114
darth_avocado wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is true, but the reason the economics have inverted is that we can pay these new "people" <$20 for the human equivalent of ~300 hours worth of non-stop typing.

Correct. And we know the AI will read the docs whereas people usually ignore 99% of docs so it just feels like a bad use of time sometimes, unfortunately.
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