I don’t feel they’re similar at all and I don’t get why people compare them.

MCP is giving the agents a bunch of functions/tools it can use to interact with some other piece of infrastructure or technology through abstraction. More like a toolbox full of screwdrivers and hammers for different purposes, or a high-level API interface that a program can use.

Skills are more similar to a stack of manuals/books in a library that teach an agent how to do something, without polluting the main context. For example a guide how to use `git` on the CLI: The agent can read the manual when it needs to use `git`, but it doesn’t need to have the knowledge how to use `git` in it’s brain when it’s not relevant.

> MCP is giving the agents a bunch of functions/tools

A directory of skills... same thing

You can use MCP the same way as skills with a different interface. There are no rules on what goes into them.

They both need descriptions and instruction around them, they both have to be is presented and index/instn to the agent dynamically, so we can tell them what they have access to without polluting the context.

See the Anthropic post on moving MCP servers to a search function. Once you have enough skills, you are going to require the same optimization.

I separate things in a different way

1. What things do I force into context (agents.md, "tools" index, files) 2. What things can the agent discorver (MCP, skills, search)