alt Hacker NewsHow likely are we to look back on Agent/MCP/Skills as some early Netscape peculiarity? I would dive into adoption if I didn't think some new thing would beat the paradigm in a fortnight.
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Agent/MCP/Skills might be "Netscape-y" in the sense that today's formats will evolve fast. But Netscape still mattered: it lost the market, not the ideas. The patterns survived (JavaScript, cookies, SSL/TLS, progressive rendering) and became best practices we take for granted.
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.
Yes this 100%. Every person i speak with who is excited about MCP is some LinkedIn Guru or product expert. I'm yet to encounter a seriously technical person excited by any of this.
Don't forget A2A: https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-...
We'll see how many of these are around in a few years.
The space is moving fast enough that everything feels provisional
How likely is it to even remember “the AI stuff” 2-3 years from now? What we’re trying to do with LLMs today is extremely unsustainable. NVidia/openai will run out of silly investors eventually…
So like any early phase, there's risk in picking a technology to use.
Skills are just prompt conventions; the exact form may change but the substance is reasonable. MCP, eh, it’s pretty bad, I can see it vanishing.
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.
Extremely likely but that doesn't mean it lacks value today
I've built a number of MCP servers, including an MCP wrapper. I'd generally recommend you skip it unless you know you need it. Conversely, I'd generally recommend you write up a couple skills ASAP to get a feel for them. It will take you 20 minutes to write and test some.
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.