I'm not sure I totally see the disdain for MCP.

These skills also rely on tools, having a standard way to add tools to an agent is good, otherwise each agent has its own siloed tools.

But also, I remember MCP having support for resources no? These skills are just context (though I guess it can include executable scripts to help, but the article said most skills are just an instruction markdown).

So you could already have an MCP expose skills as resources, and you could already have the model automatically decide to include a resource based on the resource description.

Now I understand to add user created resources is pretty annoying, and maybe it's not great for people to easily exchange themselves resources. But you assume that Slack would make the best context to generate Slack gifs, and then expose that as a resource from their MCP along with a prompt template and some tools to help or to add the gif to your slack as emojis or what not.

You could even add Skills specifically to MCP, to that you can expose a combination of context resources and scripts or something.

That said, I agree that the overabundance for tools as MCP is not that good, some tools are so powerful, they can cover 90% of all other tool use cases. Bash tool can do so many things. A generic web browsing tool as well. That's been the problem with MCP as tools.

Skills appear to be a good technique as a user, and I actually already did similar things. I like formalizing it, and it's nice that Claude Code now automatically scans and includes their description header for the model to know it can load the rest. That's the exciting part.

But I do feel for the more general public, MCP resources + prompts + tools are a better avenue.