[aaronsteers]

Great question, @Tsarp - Skill and tools work great together. What we've found is that agents generally need both to achieve great results. We're actually not trying to replace skills, but to give them new super powers.

Are there any examples you've run into where skills were missing tools (or data) that they needed for a specific task?

[Tsarp]

Hmm, hoping this isn't a generic LLM generated response.

Skills have the scripts folder and you can precisely describe when and when not to use a script. This can end up directly wrapping API(s), CLIs, generic scripts or even other MCP servers.

CC and codex both have the skill creator and you can have them build the skill for you.

Havent run into any scenarios where skills were missing tools. 1-2 iterations and its usually taken care off quite quickly.

[aaronsteers]

Hey, fair enough. (100% human here, btw.) I think I misread your original question to be asking "why do we need a service (whether accessed via API/SDK/MCP/etc.)" vs just having skills (markdown + scripts)".

If you are already leveraging skills as scripts and APIs in your skills, then you understand the distinction. I'll attempt to re-answer your question with now hopefully a better understanding:

I think Airbyte Agents helps your agent by giving access to data across any and all of the systems it may need to get data from, or write data to. While you could hit the service APIs directly (via REST/CLI/etc.), in practice we find that not all use cases are amenable to this. Airbyte Agents does have REST APIs as well as SDKs and of course the MCP interface - so it's not really about MCP tools specifically, more about how you can access the data. The Airbyte Agents interface also reduces the number of creds that the agent needs to handle, giving a single portal (with logging and audit capabilities) for all the actions your agent is taking.

Sorry for the red herring of skills-v-tools. Let me know if you have any additional questions!