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Comment by bluegatty

4 days ago

"It's hard to customize those skills."

I don't see what you mean?

An MCP and a skill are just two ways of distributing capabilities.

For telemetry ... well the agent should still have it's http logs? Also, I'm not sure MCP Telemetry is the primary point of concern for most things? Like thats a skill debugging thing?

I sync a skill in a file with my repo. I can't edit that skill. I can't combine that skill. I can't customize the skill without affecting the other folks on my team or I have to put that in a gitignore.

A user getting a skill via a plugin and wants to keep it in sync with the source has the same problem. Next update/sync wipes out their changes.

Skills delivered via file system download/git are like Deck.final.v2.real-final.2026-10-01.published.pptx. Skills delivered via MCP over HTTP are "live" and dynamic.

An HTTP MCP server is just a server returning text. The MCP prompt can be a template. It can have placeholders. I can build a UI to allow the user who logs in to customize the prompt/skill by filling in the placeholders. If they don't put a value for the placeholder, I render it to the HTTP response stream with defaults. I can dynamically render the skill, tailored for each user like I can render JSON or HTML for each logged in user. MCP Prompts just returns text. I can render any text I want on a server. I can return a different, more suitable skill text for the user. I can personalize it based on their workflow. The base template is always up to date for every user, etc.

Try it. Go write an MCP HTTP endpoint delivering a prompt. Now make that dynamic and serve different text back based on different users. Now your users are in different teams. Render variants of the same prompt/skill by team. It's powerful.

Use your imagination.

  • ?

    You can trivially build a skill that uses a set of customizable, per user values.

    You can also build a (non-MCP) 'gateway' to do those things you just described, and not have it bound or limited by 'MCP' at all.

    We already do both things.

    I don't see what MCP has to do with any of this; it's a standard, that has very narrow value.

    • You can't do it in a team environment. You are missing the key point. Teams.

      Please, go build the simplest MCP server you can that serves a prompt. Now make it dynamic by user. Now let you users share a common template. Now look at the telemetry you see on the server when someone uses the skill. Now add a flag to turn some on and off. Now imagine you are in an enterprise and you want to centrally manage all skills across the teams mapping some skills to some teams, revoke skills, force update skills, compose skills by user automatically using rules.

      Please. Just try it. You can literally vibe code this in a few minutes and connect the dots.

      A file on disk is static. An HTTP request-response for text is not. Build just one prompt endpoint. Now imagine dynamically injecting text into the skill as well because it's just HTTP.

      You are arguing why we need web servers when we can just email text files to each other, save them on disk, and open them in Notepad. Do you not understand the power of using an HTTP server for sending text?

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