Let me give you a counterexample. I'm working on a product for the national market, and i need to do all financial tasks, invoicing, submit to national fiscal databse etc. through a local accounting firm. So i integrate their API in the backend; this is a 100% custom API developed by this small european firm, with a few dozen restful enpoints supporting various accounting operations, and I need to use it programmatically to maintain sync for legal compliance. No LLM ever heard of it. It has a few hundred KB of HTML documentation that Claude can ingest perfectly fine and generate a curl command for, but i don't want to blow my token use and context on every interaction.

So I naturally felt the need to (tell Claude to) build a MCP for this accounting API, and now I ask it to do accounting tasks, and then it just does them. It's really ducking sweet.

Another thing I did was, after a particularly grueling accounting month close out, I've told Claude to extract the general tasks that we accomplished, and build a skill that does it at the end of the month, and now it's like having a junior accountant in at my disposal - it just DOES the things a professional would charge me thousands for.

So both custom project MCPs and skills are super useful in my experience.

That's what you should be doing. Start from plain Claude, then add on to it for your specific use cases where needed. Skills are fantastic if used this way. The problem is people adding hundreds or thousands of skills that they download and will never use, but just bloat the entire system and drown out a useful system.

Your use is maybe more vanilla than you think. I think you are just getting shit done. Which is good.

Claude and an mcp and skill is plain to me. Writing your own agent connecting to LLMs to try to be better than Claude code, using Ralph loops and so on is the rabbit hole.

What exactly does it do that a professional would charge you thousands for?

(I'm genuinely asking)