Claude Skills may be a bigger deal than MCP¶
Insight: Claude Skills are Markdown files telling the model how to do something, optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre-written scripts. They are conceptually simpler than MCP: no server infrastructure, no protocol negotiation, just files on disk. Skills are extremely token-efficient — each skill only adds a few dozen tokens via frontmatter YAML, with full details loaded only when relevant. Willison argues Skills may matter more than MCP for many use cases because they're easier to create, iterate on, and share.
Detail: Claude's document creation abilities (.pdf, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx) turned out to be entirely implemented using Skills. Skills depend on a coding environment — they need a sandbox where Claude can execute scripts. The key comparison to MCP: Skills are simpler (just files), more portable (copy a folder), and don't require server infrastructure. However, MCP provides real-time data access that Skills cannot. The two are complementary but Skills lower the barrier to extending Claude's capabilities dramatically.