Eighteen months ago, MCP was the thing. Every demo and chatbot connector was running on MCP under the hood. When I started seeing everyone talk about Skills, I got curious. How are MCP and Skills connected? Are they different lenses on the same problem?

I brought these questions to @greggyb again in our latest video.

What's in the video

  • What MCP actually does: giving a model programmatic access to APIs and the file system through natural language
  • Downsides of MCP: context bloat from loading hundreds of lines of tool definitions for tools you're not even using
  • What a Skill actually is (spoiler: pretty much a markdown file containing a reusable prompt)
  • Progressive disclosure: why an agent can "know about" 20 skills without loading the full instructions for all of them
  • Why MCP and Skills aren't competitors, and how Skills can even teach your agent how to use MCP tools

My favorite line from this one: the hottest programming language right now is English. Skills let non-developers write, iterate on, and share instructions that make an entire team's agents faster, no code required.

Are you using Skills yet? Curious where everyone's at.