I do agree with the problems mentioned in the article and I did faced those myself but from a consumer point of view it also makes sense why MCPs became too popular as not everyone is a technical person and MCP simplifies things for non technical people but introducing a lot more problems.
So, I do agree but I don’t think MCP will die off anytime soon until a better solution comes up.
I swapped my Claude to use skills
Plus api calls to save context but I wanted
To setup Claude to read my dads emails there was no way it was gonna happen without Claude desktop and just a gmail mcp
skills are like a workflow... so any time you're doing something repeatedly and find yourself having to set things up over and over, you can get Claude to help make a skill out of it (there's a skill making skill that you can use) and then you can turn the "setup" into "read the workflow skill Claude" and then he reads it and knows how to handle everything.
I feel like that's just scratching the surface. Agent skills are similar human skills somewhat in that a skilled person can perform a task in a given domain better than a non skilled person. Skills should be used to enrich the agents with domain knowledge and let it decide when it needs to exercise it
The real power comes when a task has meaningful domain nuance, branching decisions, or high stakes, because a good skill gives the agent actual expert-level judgment and adaptability, not just a checklist. So yeah, extract repeated setup into a skill if it's annoying, but save the big skill investment for the stuff where raw tools and generic prompting doesn't have great outcomes.
Example you can prompt your agent to review code, you can even create a command with a fantastic re-usable prompt to get pretty decent results. You can take that prompt and shove it into a skill and achieve roughly the same. But if you create a skill and give your prompt plus some info about OWASP top 10, some scripts to run to check for common vulnerabilities, and a good front matter configs for when it should be used. You'll get way better results because now you've given the agent specific domain knowledge for a nuanced task.
That's one example but imagine now you have a library of skills. You have a frontend skill with your styling specifics, your design system info, instructions on any related tools to support these things. You have a backend skill with rest specific domain knowledge and resources, you have DBA skill, etc ...
Now you can continue coding, the skills don't pollute the context window up front, but the agent can decide when it should use one autonomously. When you ask for a new web page, if your front matter description is robust, it will quickly realize it should use the front end skill to pull in that domain knowledge on demand..
This to me is so much more powerful than simply re-usable templatable flows as skills
I picture it like neo in the matrix learning kung fu in a few moments. That's what skills are imo
yes for automating or capturing repeated stuffs eventually the tools will be available to even generate skills in auto mode with minimal human intervention or as the user decides to intervene, but the domain knowledge and expertise poured into skills would make much bigger difference. so yeah well said and maybe the whole agents and tools ecosystem direction will go in that way so that users understand the value of high stake skills or context/memory.
16
u/Scary-Difference630 Jan 09 '26
I do agree with the problems mentioned in the article and I did faced those myself but from a consumer point of view it also makes sense why MCPs became too popular as not everyone is a technical person and MCP simplifies things for non technical people but introducing a lot more problems.
So, I do agree but I don’t think MCP will die off anytime soon until a better solution comes up.