Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 383 posts

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

#121

Post by fny »

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…

I don't understand why tool calling isn't the primitive. A "skill" could have easily just been a tool that an agent can build an execute in its own compute space.

I really don't see why we need two forms of RCP...

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

#122

Post by samdjstephens »

It seems to me that MCP and Skills are solving 2 different problems and provide solutions that compliment each other quite nicely.

MCP is about integration of external systems and services. Skills are about context management - providing context on demand.

As Simon mentions, one issue with MCP is token use. Skills seem like a straightforward way to manage that problem: just put the MCP tools list inside a skill where they use no tokens until required.

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

#123

Post by micromacrofoot »

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…

These are all tools for advanced users of LLMs, I've already built a couple MCPs for clients... you might not have a use for them... but there are niches already getting a lot out of them

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

#124

Post by simonw »

fny wrote: post #121
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…

I don't understand why tool calling isn't the primitive. A "skill" could have easily just been a tool that an agent can build an execute in its own compute space. I really don't see why we need two forms of RCP...

If you look through the example skills most of them are about calling existing tools, often Python via the terminal.

Take a look at this one for working with PDFs for example: https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/document-skil... - it includes a quickstart guide to using the Python pypdf module, then expands on that with some useful scripts for common patterns.

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

#125

Post by simonw »

samdjstephens wrote: post #122

It seems to me that MCP and Skills are solving 2 different problems and provide solutions that compliment each other quite nicely. MCP is about integration of external systems and services. Skills are about context management - providing context on demand. As Simon mentions, one issue with MCP is token use. Skills seem like a straightforward way to manage that problem: just put the MCP tools list inside a skill where…

You could even have a Skill that says "First call 'enable-mcp jira' to enable the Jira MCP, now here's how to use that: ..."

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

#126

Post by notepad0x90 »

zkmon wrote: post #93
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…

>> 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.

If you like creating solutions, why wait for a problem to show up? lol

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

#127

Post by globular-toast »

idk-92 wrote: post #108
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

Wolfram Alpha is AI. It's just not an LLM. AI has been a thing since the 60s. LLMs will also become "not AI" in a few years probably.

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

#128

Post by mrbonner »

I can’t quite put my finger on why this doesn’t excite me. First, there was MCP — and honestly, my feelings about it were mixed. In the end, it’s just tool calling, only now the tools are hosted somewhere else instead of being implemented as function calls. Then comes this new “skill” concept. Isn’t it just another round of renaming what we already do? We’ve been using Markdown files to guide our coding agents for ages. Overall, it feels like yet another case of “a new spin on an old thing.”

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

#129

Post by roflcopter69 »

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.

I'd be really interested in what you mean. Are the any studies that quantify this difference in model performance when using JSON or XML? What could be a good intuition for why there might be a big difference? If XML is better than JSON for LLMs, why isn't everyone and the grandma recommending me to use XML instead of JSON? Why is Google Gemini API offering structured output only with JSON schema instead of XML schema?

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

#130

Post by pjmlp »

idk-92 wrote: post #108
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

It is basically another take on Lisp, and the development approach Lisp Machines had, repackaged in a more friendly syntax.

Lisp was the AI language until the first AI Winter took place, and also took Prolog alongside it.

Wolfram Alpha basically builds on them, to put in a very simplistic way.

Post reply on HN