alt Hacker NewsSimon Willison made many of the same points (without the technical deep dive) back in October 2025 [1], when Anthropic announced Skills.
A couple of choice quotes, which are echoed in this new article:
> I like to joke that one of the reasons it took off is that every company knew they needed an “AI strategy”, and building (or announcing) an MCP implementation was an easy way to tick that box.
> Almost everything I might achieve with an MCP can be handled by a CLI tool instead.
Replies
everybodyknows • yesterday at 7:06 PM
He argues that Claude Skills is a superior approach:
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/#skills-...
Anyone here compared, by applying both to the same task?
I am pretty sure he is right about it. Let's just hope MCP won't last too long but I fear it will.
Especially if there is already an API perfectly described by an OpenAPI spec (note OpenAPI!=OpenAI ;)). Why should I host an additional MCP server or extra endpoints? Because it's trendy?