alt Hacker NewsThis isn't a zero-sum game or a choice of one over the other. They solve different layers of the developer experience: MCP provides a standardized, portable interface for external data/tools (the infrastructure), while Skills offer project-specific, high-level behavioral context (the orchestration). A robust workflow uses MCP to ensure tool reliability and Skills to define when and how to deploy those tools.
Replies
Completely agree. I don’t see why people view this as an either or decision.
Also worth mentioning that some paid MCP providers offer an actual value added. Sure, I can use curl or a self hosted crawler for web searches, but is it really worth the pain?
This is exactly right, and I'd add one more layer that the thread is mostly missing: this combination matters most when the agent itself is hosted in the cloud rather than running locally. Skills + MCP is the architecture for cloud-hosted agents - Skills give the agent its context and workflow, MCP tools give it reach into external services without the agent needing to manage credentials or runtime dependencies.
Hi, author here! I fully agree with your comment here and that’s exactly my point in the post: Different tools that work great for different tasks. If anything, the post is a take against treating Skills + CLI as a zero-sum replacement for MCP, and calling MCP dead/outdated
Especially portability is just not possible with Skills+CLI (yet). I can use the same MCP servers through remote MCP on my phone, web, iPad, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Mistral and so on, which I can’t do with Skills.
Also, the skills can be ignored or thwarted if the LLM feels like, while a policy at the MCP server level stays there.
MCP is just CLI wrapped in boxes.
CLI is the same API in more concise format. At minimum, the same amount of context overhead exist for MCP, but most of the time more because the boxes have size.
CLI can be secure, AWS CLI is doing just fine. You can also play simple tricks to hide secret in a daemon or run them remotely, and all of them are still smaller than a MCP.