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

371–380 of 383 posts

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

#371

Post by jychang »

thenanyu wrote: post #343
oblio wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The underhanded throw is mechanically just better for free throws. Much easier to put backspin, for example. It's just a shot that doesn't help anywhere else.

That’s beside the point. It wouldn’t help shaq or any of those big men hit free throws. They have no problems with mechanics.

> have no problems with mechanics.

What? Shaq shot free throws at 85% in practice. Players with good mechanics like Curry wouldn't be caught dead shooting 85% during the season, he's always 90%+ at free throws. Curry would probably shoot free throws at 99.9% in practice; there's plenty of stories of him swishing 100 3-pointers in a row in practice.

I'm not saying Shaq would shoot free throws as good as "90% in game and 99.9% in practice" if he threw free throws underhanded, but clearly Shaq had mechanics issues.

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

#372

Post by gabrielpoca118 »

lossolo wrote: post #99
gabrielpoca118 wrote: post #83

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.

sorry, I was talking about no LLM vs MCP, but in the scenario of LLM vs MCP I think at least 1 week with MCP vs LLM. It's a bit hard to estimae because every project is different, but when feeding our own instructions to the LLM it would still take a long time to UI to look exactly like figma. It could get close enough, but we still needed a lot of iterations.

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

#375

Post by bird0861 »

roflcopter69 wrote: post #224
bird0861 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the Qwen team is still all in on XML and they make a good case for it

Can you please provide a source? I'd love to know their exact reasoning and/or evidence that XML is the way to go.

afaik this was true by Q3-30BA3B and Qwen Code's release; it caused some backends to have trouble doing tool calling

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

#376

Post by crowbahr »

simonw wrote: post #332
crowbahr wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moment you write documentation it becomes stale. It's additional debt you've incurred and the upkeep must be payed every modification to the code. That doesn't mean you should skip it - but it's vital to recognize the costs. When I joined my current company they had extensive documentation on several systems, all of it outdated, stale or even just straight up wrong. I wasted cumulative weeks depending on other pr…

The fix for that is to keep the documentation in the same repository as the code it documents, and then to enforce that it gets updated as part of your code review process. Don't let a PR land if it doesn't also update any relevant documentation at the same time. Keeping documentation in a separate system - like a wiki - is an anti-pattern in most cases. It leads to documentation that nobody trusts (and hence nobody…

Hmmm I wonder if I can get that running as a GHA on my PRs

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

#377

Post by jychang »

lukeschlather wrote: post #353
jychang wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the code comments straight up just help understanding, whether human or AI. There's a piece of common knowledge that NBA basketball players can all hit over 90% on free throws, if they shot underhand (granny style). But for pride reasons, they don't throw underhand. Shaq just shot 52%, even though it'd be free points if he could easily shoot better. I suspect there's similar things in software engineering. I'…

I can't speak to LLMs, but one of my first tasks was debugging a race condition in a piece of software. (I had no idea that it was a race condition, or even what part of the code it was in.) I spent months babysitting the service and reading the codebase. When I finally fixed the issue the source turned out to be a comment that said the opposite of what the code actually did. The code was a very convoluted one-line g…

That's the kind of thing LLMs would HELP with, though.

Comments may go out of date, but LLMs can quickly generate comments that are up to date. LLMs are more likely to prevent the situation that you described.

> In many cases AIs will even add comments that only make sense as a response to my prompt and don't make any sense in-context.

Yeah, this is a common issue to be fair.

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

#378

Post by xwowsersx »

simonw wrote: post #241
xwowsersx wrote: post #239

FYI the gif is not visible to us. In the shared chat: > Perfect! I've created your Slack GIF! > [Files hidden in shared chats]

It's in the blog post (it's rubbish) - here's a direct URL: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/skills_vs_mcps....

haha thanks, no lies detected... that is rubbish :)

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

#379

Post by poopiokaka »

hansmayer wrote: post #364
simonw wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assumed bias was meant to mean I'm biased towards Anthropic, or to reflect some other unfair semi-hidden agenda that influences my writing. I do have a relevant bias here I guess: I'm biased towards the pattern of granting an LLM the ability to execute commands in a Unix-style environment. I've been a huge fan of that approach ever since ChatGPT Code Interpreter launched in early 2023 and I'm excited that skills fu…

Well, personally I believe you don't have any ulterior motives here. But be warned - when you hype up stuff like that and aligns perfectly with the interests of Anthropic (or whatever other VC-propped GenAI company), it can certainly come across the wrong way. Take this feedback as an indicator to help you steer your writing, not as a personal attack.

It’s ok he’s probably paid and lying. Don’t spend too much time. Ppl with these kinds of audience size get inflated / better than egos
Post reply on HN