Comment by dmix

The target audience isn't always people who know what curl or a python script is. It's more like an easy to install plugin you can serve up, which tells Claude which endpoints to use via a user asking a generic question (users who dont really understand how anything works behind the scenes).

It's also different than just an API because they have purpose built "tools" which have relevant names (search_campaign vs /api/v3/campaigns?q=xyz), descriptions, annotations (ie, ask used to confirm in ChatGPT before we run this DELETE).

Skills don't really accomplish that well and are more unreliable when your target audience is a B2B customer or person who forgot they installed a Perplexity MCP when Claude will automatically know to use that without invoking a skill.