Comment by dnautics
19 hours ago
i don't understand this mcp/skill distinction? one of the mcps i use indexes the runtime dependency of code modules so that claude can refactor without just blindly grepping.
how would that be a "skill"? just wrap the mcp in a cli?
fwiw this may be a skill issue, pun intended, but i can't seem to get claude to trigger skills, whereas it reaches for mcps more... i wonder if im missing something. I'm plenty productive in claude though.
So MCPs are a bunch of, essenntially skill type objects. But it has to tell you about all of them, and information about all of them up front.
So a Skill is just a smaller granulatrity level of that concept. It's just one of the individual things an MCP can do.
This is about context management at some level. When you need to do a single thing within that full list of potential things, you don't need the instructions about a ton of other unrelated things in the context.
So it's just not that deep. It would be having a python script or whatever that the skill calls that returns the runtime dependencies and gives them back to the LLM so they can refactor without blindly greping.
Does that make sense?
no that makes no sense. the skill doesn't do anything by itself, the mcp (can be) attached to a deterministic oracle that can return correct information.
But the skill includes the scripts to do things.
So in my nano banana image generation skill, it contains a python script that does all the actual work. The skill just knows how to call the python script.
We're attaching tools to the md files. This is at the granular level of how to hammer a nail, how to use a screw driver, etc. And then the agent, the handyman, has his tool box of skills to call depending on what he needs.
In our experience, a lot of it is feel and dev preference. After talking to quite a few developers, we've found the skill was the easiest to get started with, but we also have a CLI tool and an MCP server too. You can check out the docs if you'd prefer to try those - feedback welcome: https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs#cli-tool
yeah but a skill without the mcp server is just going to be super inefficient at certain things.
again going to my example, a skill to do a dependency graph would have to do a complex search. and in some languages the dependency might be hidden by macros/reflection etc which would obscure a result obtained by grep
how would you do this with a skill, which is just a text file nudging the llm whereas the MCP's server goes out and does things.
A skill is not just a text file nudging the llm. You group scripts and programming to the skill, and the skill calls it.