[vessenes]

I've built a number of MCP servers, including an MCP wrapper. I'd generally recommend you skip it unless you know you need it. Conversely, I'd generally recommend you write up a couple skills ASAP to get a feel for them. It will take you 20 minutes to write and test some.

MCP does three things conceptually: it lets you build a bridge between an agent and <something else>, it specifies a UI+API layer between the bridge and the LLM, and it formalizes the description of that bridge in a tool-calling format.

It's that UI+API layer that's the biggest pain in the ass, in my opinion. Sometimes you need it; for instance, if you wanted an agent to access your emails, a high quality MCP server that can't destroy your life through enthusiastic tool calling makes sense.

If, however, you have, say a CLI tool or simple API that's reasonably self documenting and you're willing to have it run, and/or if you need specific behavior with a different context setting, then a skill can just be a markdown file that explains what, how, why.

[throwup238]

Agreed. I use only one MCP server regularly and it’s a custom one integrated into my QT desktop app. It has tools for inspecting the widget tree, using selectors to click/type/etc, and take screenshots. Functionality that would otherwise be hard or impossible to reliably implement using CLI calls but gives Claude a closed feedback loop.

All public MCP server I’ve seen have been a disaster with too many tools and tokens polluting the context. It’s really most useful when you need tight integration with some other environment and can write a little custom wrapper to provide it.

[deaux]

> All public MCP server I’ve seen have been a disaster with too many tools and tokens polluting the context.

People like to shit on Copilot's UX but something it does well is making it incredibly easy to switch off individual tools you don't need per MCP server. In general I've found its MCP story the best out of all of them (Codex/CC/Gemini), it utilizes VSCode extensions integration very well.

[deaux]

If you know you need them though, do use them. There are four MCP servers I use regularly and they're enormously useful. They're all around the same topic though - pulling in context/data from sources. One is dual-use, in that I occasionally also use it for things like dashboard generation.

I will say, when using MCP be selective about which tools you enable. A lot of the time they come with say 30 tools and you only personally care about 5 of them. The other 25 are just rotting your context.