[stingraycharles]

Skills are good for context management as everything that happens while executing the skill remains “invisible” to the parent context, but they do inherit the parent context. So it’s pretty effective for a certain set of problems.

MCP is completely different, I don’t understand why people keep comparing the two. A skill cannot connect to your Slack server.

Skills are more similar to sub-agents, the main difference being context inheritance. Sub-agents enable you to set a different system prompt for those which is super useful.

[ako]

Are you sure, i thought skill were loaded into the main context, unlike (sub)agents. According to Claude they're loaded into the main context. Do you have link?

[stingraycharles]

No, just their header / when they should be invoked, the actual contents of the skill is never loaded in the main context.

[ako]

Unless claude decides a skill is needed, then it loads the additional details into the main context to use. It's basically lazy loading into main context.

[vidarh]

A skill can absolutely connect to your slack server. Either by describing how to use standard tools to do so, or by including code.

Most of my skills connect to APIs.