[observationist]

That's not what this is. MCP is still around and useful- skills are tailored prompt frameworks for specific tasks or contexts. They're useful for specialization, and in conjunction with post-training after some good data is acquired, will allow the next generation of models to be a lot better at whatever jobs produce good data for training.

[adam_arthur]

Local tools/skills/function definitions can already invoke any API.

There's no real benefit to the MCP protocol over a regular API with a published "client" a local LLM can invoke. The only downside is you'd have to pull this client prior.

I am using local "skill" as reference to an executable function, not specifically Claude Skills.

If the LLM/Agent executes tools via code in a sandbox (which is what things are moving towards), all LLM tools can be simply defined as regular functions that have the flexibility to do anything.

I seriously doubt MCP will exist in any form a few years from now

[asadm]

I have seen ~10 IQ points drop with each MCP I added. I have replaced them all with either skill-like instructions or curl calls in AGENTS.md with much better "tool-calling" rate.

[verdverm]

That's a context pollution problem, not an MCP problem.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use

[asadm]

building a rag for searching correct MCP is a band-aid.

[verdverm]

1. it's not just about MCP, if you have 100s of skills, you are going to have the same context issues

2. it was delegation to a subagent to select the tools that should be made available, which sounded like it got the whole list and did "rag" on the fly like any model would

You're going to want to provide your agent with search, rag, subagent context gathering (and pruning/compation/mgmt) that can work across the internet, code bases, large tool/skill sets, past interaction history. All of this can be presented as a single or few tools to your main agent and is the more meta-pattern/trend emerging

[AndyNemmity]

It isn't particularly useful. It uses a lot of context without a lot of value. Claude has written a blog post saying as much. Skills keep the context out unless it's needed.

It's a much better system in my experience.

[verdverm]

Claude did not say don't use MCP because it pollutes the context

What they said was don't pollute your context with lots of tool defs, from MCP or not. You'll see this same problem if you have 100s of skills, with their names and descriptions chewing up tokens

Their solution is to let the agent search and discover as needed, it's a general concept around tools (mcp, func, code use, skills)

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use