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by austinbaggio 169 days ago
In our experience, a lot of it is feel and dev preference. After talking to quite a few developers, we've found the skill was the easiest to get started with, but we also have a CLI tool and an MCP server too. You can check out the docs if you'd prefer to try those - feedback welcome: https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs#cli-tool
1 comments
dnautics 169 days ago
yeah but a skill without the mcp server is just going to be super inefficient at certain things.

again going to my example, a skill to do a dependency graph would have to do a complex search. and in some languages the dependency might be hidden by macros/reflection etc which would obscure a result obtained by grep

how would you do this with a skill, which is just a text file nudging the llm whereas the MCP's server goes out and does things.

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AndyNemmity 169 days ago
A skill is not just a text file nudging the llm. You group scripts and programming to the skill, and the skill calls it.
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dnautics 168 days ago
that seems token inefficient. why have the llm do a full round trip. load the skill which contains the potentially hundreds of lines code then copy and paste the code back into the compiler when it could just run it?

not that i care too too much about small amounts of tokens but depleting your context rapidly seems bad. what is the positive tradeoff here?

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AndyNemmity 167 days ago
I don't understand. The Skill runs the tools. In the cases there are problems where you can have programs replace the LLM, I think we should maximully do that.

That uses less tokens. The LLM is just calling the script, and getting the response, and then using that to continue to reason.

So I'm not exactly following.

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dnautics 165 days ago
what you are proposing is functionally equivalent to "wrapping an mcp in a cli" which is what I mentioned in my root comment.
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