Comment by cornholio
1 day ago
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.
Sure, it's basic use and nothing to flex about - was just responding specifically to the line that plan-review-implement is all you need.
Though, you get such a huge bang from customizing your config that I can easily see how you could go down that slippery slope.
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.
this is exactly how i use it too. i have a few custom MCP servers running on a mac mini homelab, one for permission management, one for infra gateway stuff. the key thing i learned is keeping CLAUDE.md updated with what each MCP server actually does and what inputs it expects. otherwise claude code will either not use the tool when it should, or call it with wrong params and waste a bunch of back and forth. once you document it properly it really does feel like having a team member who just knows how your stack works. the accounting use case is a great example because nobody else's generic tooling would ever cover that.
What exactly does it do that a professional would charge you thousands for?
(I'm genuinely asking)
The basic problem is that the reporting and accounting rules are double plus bureaucratic and you need to have on hand multiple registers that show the financial situation at any time, submit them to the tax authority etc.
To give you a small taste: you need to issue an electronic invoice for each unique customer, and submit on the fly the tax authority - but these need to correlated monthly with the money in your business bank account. The paid invoices don't just go into your bank account, they are disbursed from time to time by the payment processor, on random dates that don't sync with the accounting month, so at end of month you have to have correlate precisely what invoice is paid or not. But wait, the card processor won't just send you the money in a lump sum, it will deduct from each payment some random fee that is determined by their internal formula, then, at the end of each month, add all those deducted fees (even for payments that have not been paid to you) and issue another invoice to you, which you need to account for in you books as being partially paid each month (from the fees deducted from payments already disbursed). You also have other payment channels, each with their fees etc. So I need to balance this whole overlapping intervals mess with all sort of edge cases, chargebacks and manual interventions I refuse to think about again.
This is one example, but there are also issues with wages and their taxation, random tax law changes in the middle of the month etc. The accountant can of course solve all this for you, but once you go a few hundred invoices per month (if you sell relatively cheap services) you are considered a "medium" business, so instead of paying for basic accounting services less than 100€ per month (have the certified accountant look over your books and sign them, as required by law), you will need more expensive packages which definitely add up to thousands in a few months.
Go be an entrepreneur, they said.