Me too just use AGENTS.md and it seems to work. I don't understand what problem MCP is trying to solve and skills just sounds like something you can do in AGENTS.md
I would guess the top 10% of actual performers do the same - the people who talk about harnesses and chain multiple systems together etc will be mid table somewhere
Skills and MCP are useful for when you need to repeat specific processes, perpetually. Without them the task description and reasoning falls out of the context window, or is compressed, and the process fails.
An agent will eventually forget, or hallucinate, guardrails and requirements. Yes to AGENTS.md, but when you're actively managing the whole context window in a long-running task you don't want to just keep jamming stuff in there and hope for the best. Skills help budget tokens and stabilize around specific outcomes.
If your use case is not agentic, as you build a skill corpus you can begin having the model reason at higher and higher levels about the outcomes you're aiming at.
Eg: I'm super lazy now and ask Claude to launch the project instead of just running the command myself. This is probably best done as a skill.
Me too just use AGENTS.md and it seems to work. I don't understand what problem MCP is trying to solve and skills just sounds like something you can do in AGENTS.md
What am I missing out on?
Repeatability (see my response to op).
I would guess the top 10% of actual performers do the same - the people who talk about harnesses and chain multiple systems together etc will be mid table somewhere
Skills and MCP are useful for when you need to repeat specific processes, perpetually. Without them the task description and reasoning falls out of the context window, or is compressed, and the process fails.
An agent will eventually forget, or hallucinate, guardrails and requirements. Yes to AGENTS.md, but when you're actively managing the whole context window in a long-running task you don't want to just keep jamming stuff in there and hope for the best. Skills help budget tokens and stabilize around specific outcomes.
If your use case is not agentic, as you build a skill corpus you can begin having the model reason at higher and higher levels about the outcomes you're aiming at.
Eg: I'm super lazy now and ask Claude to launch the project instead of just running the command myself. This is probably best done as a skill.
AGENTS.md doesn't fall out of the context window so you just put whatever commands you use in there. Every time it gets too big you rewrite it.
Never had an issue doing this