Comment by simonw
6 hours ago
The solution to that is Anthropic's Skills.
Create a folder called skills/how-to-use-jira
Add several Bash scripts with the right curl commands to perform specific actions
Add a SKILL.md file with some instructions in how to use those scripts
You've effectively flattened that MCP server into some Markdown and Bash, only the thing you have now is more flexible (the coding agent can adapt those examples to cover new things you hadn't thought to tell it) and much more context-efficient (it only reads the Markdown the first time you ask it to do something with JIRA).
But that moves the burden of maintenance from the provider of the service to its users (and/or partially to intermediary in form of "skills registry" of sorts, which apparently is a thing now).
So maybe a hybrid approach would make more sense? Something like /.well-known/skills/README.md exposed and owned by the providers?
That is assuming that the whole idea of "skills" makes sense in practice.
Yeah that's true, skill distribution isn't a solved problem yet - MCPs have a URL, which is a great way of making them available for people to start using without extra steps.