This feels right in theory and wrong in practice

When measuring speed running blue team CTFs ("Breaking BOTS" talk at Chaos Congress), I saw about a ~2x difference in speed (~= tokens) for a database usage between curl (~skills) vs mcp (~python). In theory you can rewrite the mcp into the skill as .md/.py, but at that point ... .

Also I think some people are talking past one another in these discussions. The skill format is a folder that supports dropping in code files, so much of what MCP does can be copy-pasted into that. However, many people discussing skills mean markdown-only and letting the LLM do the rest, which would require a fancy bootstrapping period to make as smooth as the code version. I'd agree that skills, when a folder coming with code, does feel like largely obviating MCPs for solo use cases, until you consider remote MCPs & OAuth, which seem unaddressed and core in practice for wider use.