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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

#151

Post by simonw »

tasuki wrote: post #148
dist-epoch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What is pseudo-XML?

Looks like XML but isn't actually valid XML. This for example:

  This & that
  Simon
  Article content goes here
If you ask an LLM for the title, author and body it will give you the right answer, even though that is not a valid XML document.

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

#153

Post by hansmayer »

simonw wrote: post #146
hansmayer wrote: post #144

Reads like a sloppily disguised influencer blog post really. The feature has just been released and the author already knows they are going to be a "bigger deal than the MCP"? Although he proceeds to discredit the MCP as too complex to be able to take off towards the end of the article. Not very useful examples either, which author publishes with a bit of distancing, disclaimer almost - who the hell has time to creat…

What is an "influencer blog post"? I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity. I'm predicting skills will take off even more. If I'm wrong feel free to call me out in a few months time for making a bad prediction!

> I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity.

I did not say you said exactly that either. Read more carefully. I said you were discrediting them by implying they were too complex to take off due to resource and complexity constraints. It's clearly stated in the relevant section of your post (https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/#skills-...)

>I'm predicting skills will take off even more. If I'm wrong feel free to call me out in a few months time for making a bad prediction!

How the hell can you predict they will "take off even more" when the feature is accessible for barely 24 hours at this point? You don't even have a basic referent frame or at least a statistical usage sample for making such a statement. That's not a very reliable prediction, is it?

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

#154

Post by manojlds »

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.

To clarify, MCP was also a Anthropic innovation.

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

#155

Post by simonw »

teemur wrote: post #152

I wonder if one could write a skill called something like "Ask the damn user" that the model could use when e.g. all needed files are not in the context.

Might not need a skill for that, Claude Code just added it as a top level feature: https://twitter.com/trq212/status/1979215901577875812

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

#156

Post by krackers »

magicalhippo wrote: post #138
idk-92 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would really like something selfhosted that does the basic Wolfram Alpha math things. Doesn't need the craziest math capability but standard symbolic math stuff like expression reduction, differentiation and integration of common equations, plotting, unit wrangling. All with an easy to use text interface that doesn't require learning.

That's wolfram mathematica.

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

#158

Post by simonw »

hansmayer wrote: post #153
simonw wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is an "influencer blog post"? I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity. I'm predicting skills will take off even more. If I'm wrong feel free to call me out in a few months time for making a bad prediction!

> I didn't say that MCP was too complex to take off - it clearly took off despite that complexity. I did not say you said exactly that either. Read more carefully. I said you were discrediting them by implying they were too complex to take off due to resource and complexity constraints. It's clearly stated in the relevant section of your post ( https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/#skills-... ) >I'm pr…

> How the hell can you predict they will "take off even more" when the feature is accessible for barely 24 hours at this point?

That's what a prediction IS. If I waited until the feature had proven itself it wouldn't be much of a prediction.

The feature has also been live for more than 24 hours. I reverse-engineered it a week ago: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/10/claude-skills/ - and it's been invisibly powering the PDF/DOC/XLS/PPT creation features on https://claude.ai/ since those launched on the 9th September: https://www.anthropic.com/news/create-files

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

#160

Post by krackers »

pjmlp wrote: post #130
idk-92 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's one of the only M-expression versions of Lisp. All the weird stuff about Wolfram Language suddenly made sense when I saw it through that lens
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