Reposting a comment I made when it was posted 10 hours ago:

As someone who is looking into MCP right now, I'd love to hear what folks with experience in both of these areas think.

My first impressions are that MCP has some advantages:

- around for longer and has some momentum

- doesn't require a dev envt on the computer to be effective

- cross-vendor support

- more sophistication for complex use cases (enterprise permissions can be layered on because of OAuth support)

- multiple transport layers gives flexibility

Skills seems to have advantages too, of course:

- simpler

- easier to iterate

- less context used

I think if the other vendors follow along with skills, and we expect every computer to have access to a development environment, skills could win the day. HTML won over XML and REST won over SOAP, so simple often wins.

But the biggest drawback of MCP, the context window overuse, can be remediated by having MCP specific sub-agents that are interacted with using a primary agent, rather than injecting each MCP server into the main context.

Yeah, I think you're exactly right about MCP's advantages - especially that MCP doesn't require access a full sandboxed Linux environment to work!

I still plan to ship an MCP for one of my products to let it interact with the wider ecosystem, but as an end-user I'm going to continue mostly using Claude Code without them.

I don't understand why tool calling isn't the primitive. A "skill" could have easily just been a tool that an agent can build an execute in its own compute space.

I really don't see why we need two forms of RCP...