Skills can’t replace MCP. If you think MCP is garbage, it’s just that you don’t need it or don’t understand it. They solve two different layers of problems.
What Skills are good at: nondeterministic knowledge delivery
- Providing best practices, code examples, and decision guides
- Adaptive context management, for the LLM to use as needed
- Flexible, lightweight, and easy to create
What MCP is good at: deterministic action execution
- Tools have strict input/output schemas, and call results are predictable
- Tools can be reliably orchestrated and composed together (the timing of Skill triggers is uncertain, so combinations are unstable)
- Complete SDK infrastructure: testing, shared code, persistent connections, OAuth authentication
- Supports remote hosting and reuse across hosts
In one sentence: Skill is what lets the Agent know what to do, while MCP is what lets the Agent actually carry it out.