This is killing me with complexity. We had agents.md and were supposed to augment the context there. Now back to cursor rules and another md file to ingest.

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simonw 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

MCPs feel complicated. Skills seem to me like the simplest possible design for a mechanism for adding extra capabilities to an existing coding agent.

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febed 3 days ago | parent [-]

Can skills completely replace MCPs? For example, can a skill be configured to launch my local Python program in its own venv. I don’t want Claude to spend time spinning up a runtime

	▲	simonw 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Skills only work if you have a code environment up and running and available for a coding agent to execute commands in. You can absolutely have a skill that tells the coding agent how to use Python with your preferred virtual environment mechanism. I ended up solving that in a slightly different way - I have a Claude hook that spits attempts to run "python" or "python3" and returns an error saying "use uv run instead".

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delaminator 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I tell Claude to make its own skills. “Which part of this task is worth making a skill for, use your skill making skill to do it”

	▲	baq 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If we aren’t in the take off phase, I don’t know where we are

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rafaquintanilha 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Skills are just pointers to context so you don't need to load all of them upfront, it is as simple as that. By the way cursor rules is effectively the same as agents.md.