To my eyes skills disappear, MCP and agent definitions do not.

You can have the most capable human available to you, a supreme executive assistant. You still have to convey your intent and needs to them, your preferences, etc, with as high a degree of specificity as necessary.

And you need to provide them with access and mechanisms to do things on your behalf.

Agentic definitions are the former, and they will evolve and grow. I like the metaphor of deal terms in financial contracts- benchmarkers document billions of these now. The "deal terms" governing the work any given entity does for you will be rich and bespoke and specific, like any valuable relationship. Even if the agent is learning about you, your governance is still needed.

MCP is the latter. It is the protocol by which a thing does things for you. It will get extensions. Skill-like directives and instructions will get delivered over it.

Skills themselves are near term scaffold that will soon disappear.

I hear you - model development might overcome the shortcomings one day.

However the "waiting out" strategy needs a timeout. It might happen that agentic crutches around LLMs will bear fruit much sooner than high-quality LLMs arrive. If you don't have a timeout or a decent exit criteria you may end up waiting indefinitely, or at least until reality of things becomes too painful to ignore.

The "ski rental problem" comes to mind here, but maybe there is another "wait it out" exit strategy?

> Frontier models will eventually eat all the tedious tailored add-ons as just part of something they can do.

I don't this makes any sense as MCP is a part of something they can do already

> Right now models have roughly all of the written knowledge available to mankind, minus some obscure held out private archives and so on.

Sorry for the nit, but this is a gross oversimplification. Most private archives are not obscure but obfuscated and largely are way more valuable training data then the publicly available ones.

Want to know how the DOD may technically tracks your phone? Private.

Want to know how to make Coca Cola at scale? Private.

Want to know what the schematic is for a Google TPU? Private.

etc etc.

Well, some things fade out and some do not. How do we decide which one it is?

The reason I ask is that the pace of new things arriving is overwhelming, hence I was tempted to just ignore it. Not because things had signs of transience, but because I was drowning and didn't know where to start. That is not the same thing as actually observing signs of things being too foamy.

Agreed. I think if this is overly concerning, developing early in the innovation cycle just might not be the ideal place to be. :)

Microsoft seems to be pushing MCP pretty hard in the Azure ecosystem. My cynical take is they are very aware of the context bloat so see it as extra inference $$.