Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by billconan on Friday October 17, 2025 @01:59PM (#45619789)

but why can't I do the same with mcp? I just create a help() function that returns the help info?

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Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by CharlesW on Friday October 17, 2025 @02:05PM (#45619875)

That hypothetical might be fine, but MCPs do much more than that and their catalogs can be enormous. Here are some popular MCPs and the amount of context they eat before you've done anything with them:

  • Linear: 23 tools (~12,935 tokens)
  • JetBrains: 20 tools (~12,252 tokens)
  • Playwright: 21 tools (~9,804 tokens)

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Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by esafak on Friday October 17, 2025 @02:37PM (#45620300)

Github: 39 tools, 30K. I had to disable it.

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Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by CharlesW on Friday October 17, 2025 @02:42PM (#45620374)

Absolutely! I now have Claude Code using `gh` and haven't missed the MCP. (If there are better CLI alternatives, I'd love to hear about them.)

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Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by 8note on Friday October 17, 2025 @02:03PM (#45619835)

you can; i've seen people put mcp access behind another mcp. I'm not sure how much success they got from it though

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Re:Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP by brazukadev on Friday October 17, 2025 @02:02PM (#45619821)

Most people still don't understand MCP properly and think it's about adding 50 tools to every call. Proper MCP servers and clients implement tools/listChanged

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