Claude Skills Are Awesome, Maybe a Bigger Deal Than Mcp
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
simonwillison.netTechstory
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Artificial IntelligenceClaude SkillsMcp
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Artificial Intelligence
Claude Skills
Mcp
The author is enthusiastic about Claude Skills, a new AI feature, potentially surpassing MCP in significance, with the community showing interest and discussing its implications.
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Oct 17, 2025 at 4:09 AM EDT
3 months ago
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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.
MCP can be very clunky, both in it polluting your context and it being annoying to set up new services. Skills are simpler and put more work on the agentic harness, which I like.
Even before "Skills" I found that if you could write bash scripts for agents to execute instead of running MCP servers, that would often work a lot better. It's not always easy for things like controlling a browser, but when it does work bash scripts can be much simpler to manage. Skills are effectively an extension of this idea, just with nicer context management built-in.