The juxtaposition of MCP vs Skills in the article is very strange. These are not competing ways to achieve something. Rather skills is often a way to enable an optimization on top of MCPs.

A simplified but clarifying way to think about it is that MCP exposes all the things that can be done, and Skills encode a workflow/expertise/perspective on how something should be done given all the capabilities.

So I'm not sure why the article portrays one to be conflicting with the other (e.g. "the narrative that “MCP is dead” and “Skills are the new standard” has been hammered into my brain. Everywhere I look, someone is celebrating the death of the Model Context Protocol in favor of dropping a SKILL.md into their repository.").

You can just not choose to use a skill if it's not useful. But if it's useful a skill can add to what an MCP alone can do.