We've just started to roll out our MCP Servers and if Anthropic and the community has already moved on, we'll wait till all this churn subsides till switching over next time.

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rco8786 a day ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t really see how this replaces MCP tbh.

MCP gives the LLM access you your APIs. These skills are just text files with context about how to perform specific tasks.

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simonw a day ago | parent | next [-]

You don't need MCP if you can instead drop in a skill markdown file that says "to access the GitHub API, use curl against api.github.com and send the GITHUB_API_KEY environment variable in the authorization header. Here are some examples. Consult github-api.md for more."

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rco8786 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would much, much rather provide discreet APIs directly to the LLM via MCP than just tell it to hit the api and figure it out from the docs.

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thunky a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You don't need MCP

Depends on who the user is...

A difference/advantage of MCP is that it can be completely server-side. Which means that an average person can "install" MCP tools into their desktop or Web app by pointing it to a remote MCP server. This person doesn't want to install and manage skills files locally. And they definitely don't want to run python scripts locally or run a sandbox vm.

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Yeroc a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's going to be a lot less efficient context-wise and computing-wise than using either a purpose-built MCP or skill based around executing a script.

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SV_BubbleTime a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Am I the only person left that is still impressed that we have a natural language understanding system so good that its own tooling and additions are natural language?

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simonw a day ago | parent [-]

I still can't believe we can tell a computer to "use playwright Python to test this new feature page" and it will figure it out successfully most of the time!

	▲	qiller a day ago \| parent [-]
		Impressing, but I can't believe we went from fixing bugs to coffee-grounds-divination-prompt-guessing-and-tweaking when things don't actually go well /s

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jngiam1 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Strong agree here

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ffsm8 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Is any of it even churn? I feel like almost everything is still relevant, basically everything was a separate card which they're using to build up a house. Even RAG still has it's place

Now wherever they're able to convert that house of cards into a solid foundation or it eventually spectacularly falls over will have to be seen over the next decade.