> the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate
Is that really a thing? Everything on the other side of the MCP boundary (at least how I'm using it) is deterministic and about 100x faster (not to mention safer) than inference.
> the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate
Is that really a thing? Everything on the other side of the MCP boundary (at least how I'm using it) is deterministic and about 100x faster (not to mention safer) than inference.
Skills can be about as deterministic. Consider GitHub MCP vs skill for GH CLI.
It might use the view_pr tool, or `gh pr view`, but in the end it's still performing a deterministic action.
The benefit might be that the GH skill can contain more domain specific information about GitHub, and you only pay the context cost when the skill is read.
Personally I generally avoid MCP and have skills for CLIs -- if one doesn't exist, then I author one. For example I have a CLI for Grafana, Discord, Sentry, etc.
https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package...
Claude Code uses gh cli just fine without any skills.
If "fine" is what you need, then ok. It can stumble its way to everything eventually.
With a proper skill it can one-shot even complex commands that require poking to gh api because the basic command set doesn't work. Or it knows how to track a running CI workflow efficiently without having to try three different methods.
Source: I daily drive Claude + gh cli.
> It might use the view_pr tool, or `gh pr view`, but in the end it's still performing a deterministic action.
No its providing a deterministic output. The action it takes is still not determistic, right, since it can be either of the two options.
I don't see the benefit or even the point of "more domain specific knowledge" in a skill especially for the example you shared.