Skills for Organizations, Partners, the Ecosystem

I'm authoring equivalent in CUE, and assimilating "standard" provider ones into CUE on the fly so my agent can work with all the shenanigans out there.

We'll see how many of these are around in a few years.

MCP does three things conceptually: it lets you build a bridge between an agent and <something else>, it specifies a UI+API layer between the bridge and the LLM, and it formalizes the description of that bridge in a tool-calling format.

It's that UI+API layer that's the biggest pain in the ass, in my opinion. Sometimes you need it; for instance, if you wanted an agent to access your emails, a high quality MCP server that can't destroy your life through enthusiastic tool calling makes sense.

If, however, you have, say a CLI tool or simple API that's reasonably self documenting and you're willing to have it run, and/or if you need specific behavior with a different context setting, then a skill can just be a markdown file that explains what, how, why.

The agent loop architectural pattern (and that’s the relevant bit) is going to continue to matter. There will be new patterns for sure, but tool calling plus while loop (which is all an “agent” is) is powerful and highly general.

The durable pattern here isn't a specific file format. It's on-demand capability discovery: a small index with concise metadata so the model can find what's available, then pull details only when needed. That's a real improvement over tool calling and MCP's "preload all tools up front" approach, and it mirrors how humans work. Even as models bake more know-how into their weights, novel capabilities will always be created faster than retraining cycles. And even if context becomes unlimited, preloading everything up front remains wasteful when most of it is irrelevant to the task at hand.

So even if "Skills" gets replaced, discoverability and progressive disclosure likely survive.

Either way, that’s hilarious. Well done.

1. For an experienced Claude Code user, you can already build such an agent persona quite trivially by using the /agents settings.

2. It doesn't actually replace agents. Most people I know use pre-defined agents for some tasks, but they still want the ability to create ad-hoc agents for specific needs. Your standard, by requiring them to write markdown files does not solve this ad-hoc issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the standard, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Please tell us how REALLY feel about JavaScript.

This may all be very wrong, though, as it's mostly conjecture from the little I've worked with skills.

Inversely, you can persist/summarize a larger bit of context into a skill, so a new agent session can easily pull it in.

So yes, it's just turtles, sorry, prompts all the way down.

"MCP" was one of the worst so-called "standards" since the JWT was proposed. So I do not take them seriously when they create "open standards".

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/standards

It is not healthy when you have an obsession this bad, seriously. Seek help.

I think that they often do solve the problem, just maybe they have some other side effects/trade offs.

You need a practical and efficient way to give the llm your context. Just like every organization has its own standards, best practices, architectures that should be documented, as new developers do not know this upfront, LLMs also need your context.

An llm is not an all knowing brain, but it’s a plan-do-check-act text processing machine.

This is not the first time, perhaps expectation adjustment is in order. This is also the same company that has an exec telling people in his Discord (15m of fame recently) Claude has emotions

Marketing. That defines pretty much everything Anthropic does beyond frontier model training. They're the same people producing sensationalized research headlines about LLMs trying to blackmail folks in order to prevent being deleted.

Other than that it appears MCP prompts end up as slash commands provided by an MCP Server (instead of client side command definitions).

But the actual knowledge that is encoded in skills/commands/mcp prompts is very similar.

And also, in writing, writing from top to bottom has its disadvantages. It makes sense to emulate human writing process and have passes, as you flesh out, and conversely summarize writing.

Current LLMs can brute force these things through emulation/observation/mimicry but they arent as good as doing it the right way. Not only would I like to see "skills" but also "processes" where you create a well defined order that tasks are accomplished in sequence. Repeatable templates. This would essentially include variables in the templates, set for replacement.

Of course this requires substantial buy in from application owners - create the vocabulary - and users - agree to expose and share the sentences they generate - but the results would be worth it.

Transforming an arbitrary table is still hard, especially a table on a webpage or in a document. Sometimes I even struggle to find the right library. The effort does not seem worth it for one-off need of such transformation too. LLM can be a great tool for doing the tasks.

Additionally, I can't even get claude or codex to reliable use the prompt and simple rules (use this command to compile) in an agents.md or whatever required markdown file is needed. Why would I assume they will reliably handle skills prompts spread about a codebase?

I've even seen tool usage deteriorate while it's thinking and self commanding through its output to say.. read code from a file. Sometimes it uses tail while other times it gets confused on the output and then writes a basic python program to parse lines and strings from the same file to effectively get what was the same output as before. How bizarre!