You can’t sell that in b2b negotiations though. You can absolutely say “and for $x per user we will grant you access to our central, closed-source MCP server that does things our CLI doesn’t do”.

right, but if you have 300 employees using ai and you want to share a skill with all of them, and you want to be able to push an update to the skill, mcp provides you with a standard way to do that.

i dont understand why people are so invested in making this a winner-take-all battle. skills are ligthweight and ad-hoc, MCP is managed and centralized. there's a place for both of those things, even if your personal workflow only needs skills.