alt Hacker News> Skills are the actualization of the dream that was set out by ChatGPT Plugins .. But I have a hypothesis that it might actually work now because the models are actually smart enough for it to work.
and earlier Simon Willison argued[1] that Skills are even bigger deal than MCP.
But I do not see as much hype for Skills as it was for MCP - it seems people are in the MCP "inertia" and having no time to shift to Skills.
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I still don't get what is special about the skills directory - since like forever I instructed Claud Code - "please read X and do Y" - how skills are different from that?
I definitely see the value and versatility of Claude Skills (over what MCP is today), but I find the sandboxed execution to be painfully inefficient.
Even if we expect the LLMs to fully resolve the task, it'll heavily rely on I/O and print statements sprinkled across the execution trace to get the job done.
Skills are like the "end-user" version of MCP at best, where MCP is for people building systems. Any other point of view raises a lot of questions.
Aren't skills really just a collection of tagged MCP prompts, config resources, and tools, except with more lock-in since only Claude can use it? About that "agent virtual environment" that runs the scripts.. how is it customized, and.. can it just be a container? Aren't you going to need to ship/bundle dependencies for the tools/libraries those skills require/reference, and at that point why are we avoiding MCP-style docker/npx/uvx again?
Other things that jump out are that skills are supposed to be "composable", yet afaik it's still the case that skills may not explicitly reference other skills. Huge limiting factors IMHO compared to MCP servers that can just use boring inheritance and composition with, you know, programming languages, or composition/grouping with namespacing and such at the server layer. It's unclear how we're going to extend skills, require skills, use remote skills, "deploy" reusable skills etc etc, and answering all these questions gets us most of the way back to MCP!
That said, skills do seem like a potentially useful alternate "view" on the same data/code that MCP is covering. If it really catches on, maybe we'll see skill-to-MCP converters for serious users that want to be able do the normal stuff (like scaling out, testing in isolation, doing stuff without being completely attached to the claude engine forever). Until there's interoperability I personally can't see getting interested though
Skills do something you could already do with folder level readme files and hyperlinks inside source, but in a vendor-locked-in way. Not a fan.
I agree with you. I don't see people hyping them and I think a big part of this is that we have sort of hit an LLM fatigue point right now. Also Skills require that your agent can execute arbitrary code which is a bigger buy-in cost if your app doesn't have this already.