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Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

simonwillison.net

261–270 of 383 posts

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

#261

[flagged]

I'm not. Here are my disclosures: https://simonwillison.net/about/#disclosures

And if my disclosures aren't enough for you, here's the FTC explaining how it would be illegal for an AI vendor to pay someone to write something like this without both sides disclosing the relationship: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

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

#264
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your LLMs get rid of comments? Mine add them incessantly.

I have to yell at Gemini to not add so many comments it almost writes more comments than code by default.

check your AGENTS.md or equivalent

most of the times when LLM is misbehaving, it's my fault for leaving outdated instructions

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

#266
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…

[deleted]

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

#268
post #264
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to yell at Gemini to not add so many comments it almost writes more comments than code by default.

check your AGENTS.md or equivalent most of the times when LLM is misbehaving, it's my fault for leaving outdated instructions

Nah, it's definitely not that. I have it explicitly several times over in that file and it insists on commenting so much it's absurd.

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

#269
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd hazard a guess the former.

The former is a step function change. The latter is just a small improvement.

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

#270
post #125

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: ..."

I tried. Claude Code can't enable a disabled MCP on the fly.
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