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".