[vidarh]

There's no lock-in there.

Tell your agent of choice to read the preamble of all the documents in the skills directory, and tell it that when it has a task that matches one of the preambles, it should read the rest of the relevant file for full instructions.

There are far fewer dependencies for skills than for MCP. Even a model that knows nothing about tool use beyond how to run a shell command, and has no support for anything else can figure out skills.

I don't know what you mean regarding explicitly referencing other skills - Claude at least is smart enough that if you reference a skill that isn't even properly registered, it will often start using grep and find to hunt for it to figure out what you meant. I've seen this happen regularly while developing a plugin and having errors in my setup.

[robot-wrangler]

> There are far fewer dependencies for skills than for MCP.

This is wrong and an example magical thinking. AI obviously does not mean that you can ship/use software without addressing dependencies? See for example https://github.com/anthropics/skills/blob/main/slack-gif-cre... or worse, the many other skills that just punt on this and assume CLI tools and libraries are already available

[vidarh]

It is categorically not wrong. With an MCP you have at a minimum all the same dependencies and on top of that a dependency on your agent supporting MCP. With skills, a lot of the time you don't need to ship code at all - just an explanation to the agent of how to use standard tools to access an API for example, but when you do need to ship code, you don't need to ship any more code than with an MCP.

The trivial evidence of this, is that if you have an MCP server available, the skill can simply explain to the agent how to use the MCP server, and so even the absolute worst case for skills is parity.