alt Hacker NewsBefore you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context bloat and tool call redundancy complaints. But this structure for handling auth has real value.
Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.
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> The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is
The real lesson is that MCP vs skills is not a binary. They are simply different tools. Each may or may not be better given different requirements.
Which is better, a knife or a saw?
I agree that having auth outside of context window is good.
But the real value of MCP is adding a semantic layer on top of APIs. Skills are client side and don’t know the server’s capabilities. MCP lets the server explain its API in natural language so clients who have no prior knowledge of the server, it’s API, or its domain can use it intelligently.
I used to think MCP was dumb. I’ve written to large MCP servers, one for CAD and one for music, and I am a complete convert.
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Mcp allows a fantastic audit trail also. As well as allowing segregation of responsibilities - ie authenticating 6 linear accounts across 6 clients and then deciding which one to use with deterministic audited methods