I could not agree any less with the author. I don’t want APIs, I want agents to use the same CLI tooling I already use that is locally available. If my agents are using CLI tooling anyways there is no need to add an extra layer via MCP.
I don’t want remote MCP calls, I don’t even want remote models but that’s cost prohibitive.
If I need to call an API, a skill with existing CLI tooling is more than capable.
I keep getting hung up on securely storing and using secrets with CLI vs MCP. With MCP, you can run the server before you run the agent, so the agent never even has the keys in its environment. That way. If the agent decides to install the wrong npm package that auto dumps every secret it can find, you are less likely to have it sitting around. I haven’t figured out a good way to guarantee that with CLIs.
A CLI can just be a RPC call to a daemon, exact same pattern apply. In fact my most important CLI based skill are like this.. a CLI by itself is limited in usefulness.
Ok, but there are still many environments where an LLM will not have access to a CLI. In those situations, skills calling CLI tools to hook into APIs are DOA.
What are the advantages of using an environment that doesn't have access to a CLI, only having to run/maintain your own server, or pay someone else to maintain that server, so AI has access to tools? Can't you just use AI in the said server?
Obvious example is a corporate chatbot (if it's using tools, probably for internal use). Non-technical users might be accessing it from a phone or locked-down corporate device, and you probably don't want to run a CLI in a sandbox somewhere for every session, so you'd like the LLM to interface with some kind of API instead.
Although, I think MCP is not really appropriate for this either. (And frankly I don't think chatbots make for good UX, but management sure likes them.)
MCP really only makes sense for chatbots that don’t want to have per session runtime environments. In that context, MCP makes perfect sense. It’s just an adapter between an LLM and an API. If you have access to an execution engine, then yes CLI + skills is superior.
This is obviously not what it is. If I give you APIGW would you be able to implement an MCP server with full functionality without a large amount of middleware?
gateway agent is a thing for many months now (and I don't mean openclaw, that's grown into a disaster security wise). There are good, minimal gateway agents today that can fit in your pocket.
This isn't a zero-sum game or a choice of one over the other. They solve different layers of the developer experience: MCP provides a standardized, portable interface for external data/tools (the infrastructure), while Skills offer project-specific, high-level behavioral context (the orchestration). A robust workflow uses MCP to ensure tool reliability and Skills to define when and how to deploy those tools.
CLI is the same API in more concise format. At minimum, the same amount of context overhead exist for MCP, but most of the time more because the boxes have size.
CLI can be secure, AWS CLI is doing just fine. You can also play simple tricks to hide secret in a daemon or run them remotely, and all of them are still smaller than a MCP.
I think many of us have been burned by the absolutely awful and unstable JIRA MCP and found that skills using `acli` actually work and view the rest of the MCP space thru that lens. Lots of early - and current! - MCP implementations were bad. So it’s an uphill battle to rebuild reputation.
I built an internal company MCP that uses Google Workspace auth and injects a mix of guidance (disguised as tools) on how we would like certain tasks to be accomplished via Claude as well as API-like capabilities for querying internal data and safely deploying small apps internally.
I’d really love to get away from the SSE MCP endpoints we use, as the Claude desktop app can get really finicky about disconnects. I thought about distributing some CLIs with Skills instead. But, MCP can be easily updated with new tools and instructions, and it’s easy to explain how to add to Claude for non-technical people. I can’t imagine trying to make sure everyone in my company had the latest skill and CLI on their machine.
I've started thinking of these systems as legacy systems. We have them. They are important and there's a lot of data in them. But they aren't optimal any more.
How we access them and where data lives is essentially an optimization problem. And AI changes what is optimal. Having data live in some walled garden with APIs designed to keep people out (most SAAS systems) is arguably sub optimal at this point. Sorting out these plumbing issues is actually a big obstacle for people to do productive things via agentic tools with these systems.
But a good way to deal with this is to apply some system thinking and figure out if you still need these systems at all. I've started replacing a lot of these things with simple coder friendly solutions. Not because I'm going to code against these things but because AI tools are very good at doing that on my behalf. If you are going to access data, it's nicer if that data is stored locally in a way that makes it easy to access that data. MCP for some SAAS thing is nice. A locally running SQL database with the data is nicer. And a lot faster to access. Processing data close to where it is stored is optimal.
As for MCP. I think it's not that important. Most agentic coding tools switch effortlessly between protocols and languages. In the end MCP is just another RPC protocol. Not a particularly good or optimal one even. If you had an API or cli already, it's a bit redundant to add MCP. Auth is indeed a key challenge. And largely not solved yet. I don't think MCP adds a whole lot of new elements for that.
Despite thinking this is AI-generated, I agree but everything has a caveat.
Skills are good for instilling non-repeatable, yet intuitive or institutional knowledge.
MCP’s are great for custom, repeatable tasks. After 5-10 runs of watching my LLM write the same exact script, I just asked it to hardcode the solution and make it a tool. The result is runs are way faster and repeatable.
> Skills are good for instilling non-repeatable, yet intuitive or institutional knowledge.
What about just putting that sort of thing in human-targeted documentation? Why call it a “skill” and hide it somewhere a human is less likely to look?
If the model can figure it out with tokens, but my institutional knowledge MCP tool can do it with a few CPU cycles, it’s faster and deterministic and repeatable.
For indie developers like myself, I often use chat GPT desktop and Claude desktop for arbitrary tasks, though my main workhorse is a customized coding harness with CC daemons on my nas. With the apps, b I missed having access to my Nas server where my dev environment is. So I wrote a file system MCP and hosted it with a reverse proxy on my Truenas with auth0. I wanted access to it from all platforms CharGPT mobile, desktop. Same for CC.
For chatgpt desktop and Claude desktop my experience with MCPs connected to my home NAS is pretty poor. It(as in the app) often times out fetching data(even though there is no latency for serving the request in the logs), often the existing connection gets invalidated between 2 chat turns and chat gpt just moves on answering without the file in hand.
I am not using it for writing code, its mostly read only access to Fs. Has anyone surmounted these problems for this access patterns and written about how to build mcps to be reliable?
Everything will go to the simplest and most convenient, often both, despite the resistance of the complexity lovers.
Sorry MCP, you are not as simple as CLI/skill/combination, and no, you are not more secure just because you are buried under 3 level of spaghetti. There are no reason for you to exist, just like Copilot. I don't just wish, but know you'll go into obscurity like IE6.
Thanks for the 3x context usages because it need to follow the installation steps. and extra credit for the auth token leaks because it is sent in every call as context.
> ChatGPT can’t run CLIs. Neither can Perplexity or the standard web version of Claude. Unless you are using a full-blown compute environment (like Perplexity Computer, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, or Codex), any skill that relies on a CLI is dead on arrival.
Incorrect observation. Claude web does support skills upload. I guess claude runs code_interpreter tool and filesystem in the background to run user uploaded skills. ChatGPT business plans too allow uploading custom skills in web.
I can see Skills becoming a standard soon. But the concern still holds. When you publish a MCP you liberate the user out of installing anything. But with skills what happens if the skill running environment don't have access to the cli binary or if it isn't in PATH?
My biggest gripe with skills is that even clear and explicit instructions are regularly ignored - even when the skill is brief (< 100 lines).
I’ll often see the agent saying it’s about to do something so I’ll stop it and ask “what does the xxx skill say about doing that?’ And it’ll go away and think and then say “oh, the skill says I should never do that”
People in the comments still confused about “agentic development” vs. “agentic development”. One uses the cli best, while the other cannot use a cli very well.
The first is using agents locally to develop.
The second is developing an agent. Not necessarily for coding, mind you. Not even for just text sometimes.
They are different cases, MCP is great for the latter.
Anthropic says that Skills and MCPs are complementary, and frankly the pure Skills zealots tend to miss that in enterprise environments you’ll have chatbots or the like that don’t have access to a full CLI. It doesn’t matter if your skills tell the agent exactly what to do if they can’t execute the commands. Also, MCP is better for restricted environments because you know exactly what it can or cannot do. That’s why MCP will exist for some time still. They solve distinct problem sets.
Different tools for different jobs man... I prefer the right tool for the job, and both skills and MCP seem necessary. Do you also prefer forks over spoons?
MCPs are basically just JSON-rpc. The benefit is that if you have applications that require an API key, you can build a server to control access (especially for enterprise). It's the same as REST apis, except by following a specific convention we can take advantage of generic tools (like the one I built) and means you don't need to rely on poor documentations to connect or train a model to use your very specific CLI.
But if you have customer facing APIs then all of these problems were already solved in an enterprise context. You can force an oauth flow from skills if you want.
I don’t think that CLIs are the path forward either, but you certainly don’t have to teach a model how to use them. We’ve made internal CLIs that adhere to no best practices and expose limited docs. Models since 4o have used them with no issue.
The amount of terminal bench data is just much higher and more predictable in rl environments. Getting a non thinking model to use an MCP server, even hosted products, is an exercise in frustration compared to exposing a cli.
A lot of our work is over voice, and I’ve found zero MCPs that I haven’t immediately wanted to wrap in a tool. I’ve actually had zero MCPs perform at all (most recently last week with a dwh MCP and opus 4.6, where even the easiest queries did not work at all).
AI tools for non technical users that can work on browsers and mobile app will be super powerful. I think MCPs are currently the best way to reach this audience.
I've remained leaning a bit towards MCP until lately. Both have pretty easy ways to call the other (plenty of cli API callers, and tools like mcp-cli for the reverse https://github.com/philschmid/mcp-cli). Skills have really made progressive discovery if cli-tools much better, and MCP design has adapted likewise. I've lightly preferred MCP for formalism, for it feeling more concrete as a thing.
But what really changed my mind is seeing how much more casual scripting the LLMs do these days. They'll build rad unix pipes, or some python or node short scripts. With CLI tools, it all composes: every trick it learns can plug directly into every other capability.
Where-as with MCP, the LLM has to act as the pipe. Tool calls don't compose! It can read something like this tmux skill then just adapt it in all sorts of crazy ways! It can sort of do that with tool calls, but much less so. https://github.com/nickgnd/tmux-mcp
I'd love to see a capnproto capnweb or some such, with third party handoff (apologies Kenton for once again raising 3ph), where a tool call could return a result and we could forward the result to a different LLM, without even waiting for the result to come back. If the LLM could compose tool calls, it would start to have some parity with the composability of the cli+skill. But it doesn't. And as of very recently I've decided that is too strong a selling point to be ignored. I also just like how the cli remains the universe system: if these are so isomorphic as I keep telling myself, what really does the new kid on the block really bring? How much is a new incarnation better if their capabilities are so near? We should keep building cli tools, good cli tools, so that man and machine benefit.
That said I still leave the beads mcp server around. And I turn on the neovim MCP when I want to talk to neovim. Ah well. I should try harder to switch.
> Skills are great for pure knowledge and teaching an LLM how to use an existing tool. But for giving an LLM actual access to services, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the far superior, more pragmatic architectural choice.
There's your answer. If you want to use local tools, use Skills. If you want to use services, use MCP. Or, you know, whatever works best for your scenario.
I love the idea of MCP, but it needs a progressive disclosure mechanism. A large MCP from a provider with hundreds or even thousands of tools can eat up a huge amount of your context window. Additionally, MCPs come in a bunch of different flavors in terms of transport and auth mechanisms, and not all harnesses support all those options well.
I’ve gone the other way, and used MCP-CLI to define all my MCP servers and wrap them in a CLI command for agent use. This lets me easily use them both locally and in cloud agents, without worrying about the harness support for MCP or how much context window will be eaten up. I have a minimal skill for how to use MCP-CLI, with progressive disclosure in the skill for each of the tools exposed by MCP-CLI. Works great.
All that said, I do think MCP will probably be the standard going forward, it just has too much momentum. Just need to solve progressive disclosure (like skills have!) and standardize some of the auth and transport layer stuff.
I thought Claude Code and others do progressive disclosure for MCP now as well.
The article claims so:
> Smart Discovery: Modern apps (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) have tool search built-in. They only look for and load tools when they are actually needed, saving precious context window.
This author does not realize that skills can call APIs. The idea that you have to build dedicated CLI apps is not true at all and invalidates the entire article.
There is no world in which an enterprise is not OK with an agent having access to a CLI but is OK with possibly getting prompt injected from a random web search.
Can you clarify what exactly you mean? Skills are markdown files, so they definitely can't call APIs or CLIs. Are you saying that a skill can tell the agent to use curl to call web APIs? Or something different?
Technically they can at least how I'm using or abusing them - I ride windows so they have a generic powershell script bolted on to handle special API use through the skill to make it easier for the agent to call data up noted in the skill. does it lack full API details? absolutely. I have also a learning skill where if it has to go for a think / fail / try to figure something new out to grow a new skill or update an existing one.
skills to me suck when they are shared with a team - haven't found the secret sauce here to keep these organic skills synced between everyone
I could not agree any less with the author. I don’t want APIs, I want agents to use the same CLI tooling I already use that is locally available. If my agents are using CLI tooling anyways there is no need to add an extra layer via MCP.
I don’t want remote MCP calls, I don’t even want remote models but that’s cost prohibitive.
If I need to call an API, a skill with existing CLI tooling is more than capable.
I keep getting hung up on securely storing and using secrets with CLI vs MCP. With MCP, you can run the server before you run the agent, so the agent never even has the keys in its environment. That way. If the agent decides to install the wrong npm package that auto dumps every secret it can find, you are less likely to have it sitting around. I haven’t figured out a good way to guarantee that with CLIs.
A CLI can just be a RPC call to a daemon, exact same pattern apply. In fact my most important CLI based skill are like this.. a CLI by itself is limited in usefulness.
Ok, but there are still many environments where an LLM will not have access to a CLI. In those situations, skills calling CLI tools to hook into APIs are DOA.
What are the advantages of using an environment that doesn't have access to a CLI, only having to run/maintain your own server, or pay someone else to maintain that server, so AI has access to tools? Can't you just use AI in the said server?
Obvious example is a corporate chatbot (if it's using tools, probably for internal use). Non-technical users might be accessing it from a phone or locked-down corporate device, and you probably don't want to run a CLI in a sandbox somewhere for every session, so you'd like the LLM to interface with some kind of API instead.
Although, I think MCP is not really appropriate for this either. (And frankly I don't think chatbots make for good UX, but management sure likes them.)
Why are they not calling APIs directly with strictly defined inputs and outputs like every other internal application?
The story for MCP just makes no sense, especially in an enterprise.
MCP really only makes sense for chatbots that don’t want to have per session runtime environments. In that context, MCP makes perfect sense. It’s just an adapter between an LLM and an API. If you have access to an execution engine, then yes CLI + skills is superior.
MCP is an API with strictly defined inputs and outputs.
This is obviously not what it is. If I give you APIGW would you be able to implement an MCP server with full functionality without a large amount of middleware?
The advantage is that I can have it in my pocket.
gateway agent is a thing for many months now (and I don't mean openclaw, that's grown into a disaster security wise). There are good, minimal gateway agents today that can fit in your pocket.
idk, just have a standard internet request tool that skills can describe endpoints to. like you could mock `curl` even for the same CLI feel
Now you’ve replicated MCP but with extra steps and it’s harder to debug.
skills can have code bundled with them, including MCP code
The agent still doesn’t have an execution environment. It can’t execute the code!
This isn't a zero-sum game or a choice of one over the other. They solve different layers of the developer experience: MCP provides a standardized, portable interface for external data/tools (the infrastructure), while Skills offer project-specific, high-level behavioral context (the orchestration). A robust workflow uses MCP to ensure tool reliability and Skills to define when and how to deploy those tools.
MCP is just CLI wrapped in boxes.
CLI is the same API in more concise format. At minimum, the same amount of context overhead exist for MCP, but most of the time more because the boxes have size.
CLI can be secure, AWS CLI is doing just fine. You can also play simple tricks to hide secret in a daemon or run them remotely, and all of them are still smaller than a MCP.
The "only skills" people are usually non-technical and the "only CLI" people are often solo builders.
MCP makes a lot of sense for enterprise IMO. Defines auth and interfaces in a way that's a natural extension of APIs.
I think many of us have been burned by the absolutely awful and unstable JIRA MCP and found that skills using `acli` actually work and view the rest of the MCP space thru that lens. Lots of early - and current! - MCP implementations were bad. So it’s an uphill battle to rebuild reputation.
I built an internal company MCP that uses Google Workspace auth and injects a mix of guidance (disguised as tools) on how we would like certain tasks to be accomplished via Claude as well as API-like capabilities for querying internal data and safely deploying small apps internally.
I’d really love to get away from the SSE MCP endpoints we use, as the Claude desktop app can get really finicky about disconnects. I thought about distributing some CLIs with Skills instead. But, MCP can be easily updated with new tools and instructions, and it’s easy to explain how to add to Claude for non-technical people. I can’t imagine trying to make sure everyone in my company had the latest skill and CLI on their machine.
I've started thinking of these systems as legacy systems. We have them. They are important and there's a lot of data in them. But they aren't optimal any more.
How we access them and where data lives is essentially an optimization problem. And AI changes what is optimal. Having data live in some walled garden with APIs designed to keep people out (most SAAS systems) is arguably sub optimal at this point. Sorting out these plumbing issues is actually a big obstacle for people to do productive things via agentic tools with these systems.
But a good way to deal with this is to apply some system thinking and figure out if you still need these systems at all. I've started replacing a lot of these things with simple coder friendly solutions. Not because I'm going to code against these things but because AI tools are very good at doing that on my behalf. If you are going to access data, it's nicer if that data is stored locally in a way that makes it easy to access that data. MCP for some SAAS thing is nice. A locally running SQL database with the data is nicer. And a lot faster to access. Processing data close to where it is stored is optimal.
As for MCP. I think it's not that important. Most agentic coding tools switch effortlessly between protocols and languages. In the end MCP is just another RPC protocol. Not a particularly good or optimal one even. If you had an API or cli already, it's a bit redundant to add MCP. Auth is indeed a key challenge. And largely not solved yet. I don't think MCP adds a whole lot of new elements for that.
Despite thinking this is AI-generated, I agree but everything has a caveat.
Skills are good for instilling non-repeatable, yet intuitive or institutional knowledge.
MCP’s are great for custom, repeatable tasks. After 5-10 runs of watching my LLM write the same exact script, I just asked it to hardcode the solution and make it a tool. The result is runs are way faster and repeatable.
You could hardcode the script as a file within a skill too right? Skills can contain code, not just markdown files.
> Skills are good for instilling non-repeatable, yet intuitive or institutional knowledge.
What about just putting that sort of thing in human-targeted documentation? Why call it a “skill” and hide it somewhere a human is less likely to look?
(Skills are nice for providing /shortcuts.)
> Skills are good for instilling non-repeatable, yet intuitive or institutional knowledge.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but can you explain this more? I've been using skills for repeatable tasks. Why an MCP instead?
If the model can figure it out with tokens, but my institutional knowledge MCP tool can do it with a few CPU cycles, it’s faster and deterministic and repeatable.
For indie developers like myself, I often use chat GPT desktop and Claude desktop for arbitrary tasks, though my main workhorse is a customized coding harness with CC daemons on my nas. With the apps, b I missed having access to my Nas server where my dev environment is. So I wrote a file system MCP and hosted it with a reverse proxy on my Truenas with auth0. I wanted access to it from all platforms CharGPT mobile, desktop. Same for CC.
For chatgpt desktop and Claude desktop my experience with MCPs connected to my home NAS is pretty poor. It(as in the app) often times out fetching data(even though there is no latency for serving the request in the logs), often the existing connection gets invalidated between 2 chat turns and chat gpt just moves on answering without the file in hand.
I am not using it for writing code, its mostly read only access to Fs. Has anyone surmounted these problems for this access patterns and written about how to build mcps to be reliable?
Occams Razor spares none.
Everything will go to the simplest and most convenient, often both, despite the resistance of the complexity lovers.
Sorry MCP, you are not as simple as CLI/skill/combination, and no, you are not more secure just because you are buried under 3 level of spaghetti. There are no reason for you to exist, just like Copilot. I don't just wish, but know you'll go into obscurity like IE6.
Thanks for the 3x context usages because it need to follow the installation steps. and extra credit for the auth token leaks because it is sent in every call as context.
A webpage with a form should be good enough.
I can see Skills becoming a standard soon. But the concern still holds. When you publish a MCP you liberate the user out of installing anything. But with skills what happens if the skill running environment don't have access to the cli binary or if it isn't in PATH?
This is the same as saying "I still prefer hammer over screwdriver".
My biggest gripe with skills is that even clear and explicit instructions are regularly ignored - even when the skill is brief (< 100 lines).
I’ll often see the agent saying it’s about to do something so I’ll stop it and ask “what does the xxx skill say about doing that?’ And it’ll go away and think and then say “oh, the skill says I should never do that”
People in the comments still confused about “agentic development” vs. “agentic development”. One uses the cli best, while the other cannot use a cli very well.
The first is using agents locally to develop.
The second is developing an agent. Not necessarily for coding, mind you. Not even for just text sometimes.
They are different cases, MCP is great for the latter.
Anthropic says that Skills and MCPs are complementary, and frankly the pure Skills zealots tend to miss that in enterprise environments you’ll have chatbots or the like that don’t have access to a full CLI. It doesn’t matter if your skills tell the agent exactly what to do if they can’t execute the commands. Also, MCP is better for restricted environments because you know exactly what it can or cannot do. That’s why MCP will exist for some time still. They solve distinct problem sets.
> Also, MCP is better for restricted environments because you know exactly what it can or cannot do.
The continuous exploits of MCP despite limited adoption really makes this seem wrong.
Different tools for different jobs man... I prefer the right tool for the job, and both skills and MCP seem necessary. Do you also prefer forks over spoons?
Or use both. Remote MCPs are secure, CLI allows for programmatic execution. Use bash to run remote MCPs.
I built this to solve this exact problem. https://github.com/turlockmike/murl
What about remote MCPs lend themselves to security? For instance, do you think that it is more secure than a traditional endpoint?
MCPs are basically just JSON-rpc. The benefit is that if you have applications that require an API key, you can build a server to control access (especially for enterprise). It's the same as REST apis, except by following a specific convention we can take advantage of generic tools (like the one I built) and means you don't need to rely on poor documentations to connect or train a model to use your very specific CLI.
But if you have customer facing APIs then all of these problems were already solved in an enterprise context. You can force an oauth flow from skills if you want.
I don’t think that CLIs are the path forward either, but you certainly don’t have to teach a model how to use them. We’ve made internal CLIs that adhere to no best practices and expose limited docs. Models since 4o have used them with no issue.
The amount of terminal bench data is just much higher and more predictable in rl environments. Getting a non thinking model to use an MCP server, even hosted products, is an exercise in frustration compared to exposing a cli.
A lot of our work is over voice, and I’ve found zero MCPs that I haven’t immediately wanted to wrap in a tool. I’ve actually had zero MCPs perform at all (most recently last week with a dwh MCP and opus 4.6, where even the easiest queries did not work at all).
AI tools for non technical users that can work on browsers and mobile app will be super powerful. I think MCPs are currently the best way to reach this audience.
I still use vanilla Claude Code without MCP or skills, am I in the minority? Not trying to be a luddite.
Use both. These do different things.
I've remained leaning a bit towards MCP until lately. Both have pretty easy ways to call the other (plenty of cli API callers, and tools like mcp-cli for the reverse https://github.com/philschmid/mcp-cli). Skills have really made progressive discovery if cli-tools much better, and MCP design has adapted likewise. I've lightly preferred MCP for formalism, for it feeling more concrete as a thing.
But what really changed my mind is seeing how much more casual scripting the LLMs do these days. They'll build rad unix pipes, or some python or node short scripts. With CLI tools, it all composes: every trick it learns can plug directly into every other capability.
Where-as with MCP, the LLM has to act as the pipe. Tool calls don't compose! It can read something like this tmux skill then just adapt it in all sorts of crazy ways! It can sort of do that with tool calls, but much less so. https://github.com/nickgnd/tmux-mcp
I'd love to see a capnproto capnweb or some such, with third party handoff (apologies Kenton for once again raising 3ph), where a tool call could return a result and we could forward the result to a different LLM, without even waiting for the result to come back. If the LLM could compose tool calls, it would start to have some parity with the composability of the cli+skill. But it doesn't. And as of very recently I've decided that is too strong a selling point to be ignored. I also just like how the cli remains the universe system: if these are so isomorphic as I keep telling myself, what really does the new kid on the block really bring? How much is a new incarnation better if their capabilities are so near? We should keep building cli tools, good cli tools, so that man and machine benefit.
That said I still leave the beads mcp server around. And I turn on the neovim MCP when I want to talk to neovim. Ah well. I should try harder to switch.
skills and mcp help with entirely different things. sure most products add a skill on using their mcp so that model's tool calling works good.
> Skills are great for pure knowledge and teaching an LLM how to use an existing tool. But for giving an LLM actual access to services, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the far superior, more pragmatic architectural choice.
There's your answer. If you want to use local tools, use Skills. If you want to use services, use MCP. Or, you know, whatever works best for your scenario.
I still prefer apples over oranges
I love the idea of MCP, but it needs a progressive disclosure mechanism. A large MCP from a provider with hundreds or even thousands of tools can eat up a huge amount of your context window. Additionally, MCPs come in a bunch of different flavors in terms of transport and auth mechanisms, and not all harnesses support all those options well.
I’ve gone the other way, and used MCP-CLI to define all my MCP servers and wrap them in a CLI command for agent use. This lets me easily use them both locally and in cloud agents, without worrying about the harness support for MCP or how much context window will be eaten up. I have a minimal skill for how to use MCP-CLI, with progressive disclosure in the skill for each of the tools exposed by MCP-CLI. Works great.
All that said, I do think MCP will probably be the standard going forward, it just has too much momentum. Just need to solve progressive disclosure (like skills have!) and standardize some of the auth and transport layer stuff.
I thought Claude Code and others do progressive disclosure for MCP now as well.
The article claims so:
> Smart Discovery: Modern apps (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) have tool search built-in. They only look for and load tools when they are actually needed, saving precious context window.
This author does not realize that skills can call APIs. The idea that you have to build dedicated CLI apps is not true at all and invalidates the entire article.
He did. That's what the "you aren’t forcing the user to manage raw tokens and secrets in plain text." bit comes in.
No, the point was that you don’t have access to a CLI in every environment.
You could have access to a web browser or web request tool instead.
There is no world in which an enterprise is not OK with an agent having access to a CLI but is OK with possibly getting prompt injected from a random web search.
Can you clarify what exactly you mean? Skills are markdown files, so they definitely can't call APIs or CLIs. Are you saying that a skill can tell the agent to use curl to call web APIs? Or something different?
Technically they can at least how I'm using or abusing them - I ride windows so they have a generic powershell script bolted on to handle special API use through the skill to make it easier for the agent to call data up noted in the skill. does it lack full API details? absolutely. I have also a learning skill where if it has to go for a think / fail / try to figure something new out to grow a new skill or update an existing one.
skills to me suck when they are shared with a team - haven't found the secret sauce here to keep these organic skills synced between everyone
Skills can bundle scripts. Skills can express how to use curl. Skills can integrate with your fips keys if you want them to.
https://agentskills.io/specification
* references/ Contains additional documentation that agents can read when needed
* scripts/ Contains executable code that agents can run.
* assets/ Contains static resources
They almost certainly mean skills can tell the agent to use the api, and it can succeed at doing that.
And call MCPs as well
auth