> 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.

I think that this extension points out other benefits to MCP over skills:

   * centralized control
   * ease of use for employees
   * auditing/compliance
   * deployment model

It seems the state of the art for deploying skills is "copy this file and put it in this place" or "check out this repo and add a symlink" or "run this slash command to install the skill". (I'm not aware of any solution that pushes skills out.)

These options are simple, but not as easy as this extension makes rollout of a new MCP server to an employee.

Mcp allows a fantastic audit trail also. As well as allowing segregation of responsibilities - ie authenticating 6 linear accounts across 6 clients and then deciding which one to use with deterministic audited methods

I’m work on a platform for restaurant reviewing with your friends, and (after a few stumbles) MCP definitely seems the way to go. Normies will not hunt down their claude directory and paste a skill file. “Connections” is something they understand, and pasting the mcp or finding it in the marketplace is easier for them.

TBD if having agent access to places and reviews is helpful, hah!

> The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is

The real lesson is that MCP vs skills is not a binary. They are simply different tools. Each may or may not be better given different requirements.

Which is better, a knife or a saw?

Aside from that, MCPs also allow connecting an external platform without a runtime environment. Every time this topic comes up, engineers act like Claude Code was the only application for AI agents, while there's tons of use cases in other verticals aside from coding. The harness is not running on a local machine, but rather an isolated and restricted container in some cloud deployment, where running arbitrary code would be a big nope. But you still want customers to be able to connect their existing tools to your agent.

MCP is the perfect answer for this - it gives an agent a connector with built-in authentication to all kinds of additional tooling. Skills just don't qualify here at all.

MCP tool search fixes the major issue imo, MCP clears skills/clis in every other way

I agree that having auth outside of context window is good.

But the real value of MCP is adding a semantic layer on top of APIs. Skills are client side and don’t know the server’s capabilities. MCP lets the server explain its API in natural language so clients who have no prior knowledge of the server, it’s API, or its domain can use it intelligently.

I used to think MCP was dumb. I’ve written to large MCP servers, one for CAD and one for music, and I am a complete convert.

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