> Instead of a bloated API, an MCP should be a simple, secure gateway that provides a few powerful, high-level tools [...] In this model, MCP’s job isn’t to abstract reality for the agent; its job is to manage the auth, networking, and security boundaries and then get out of the way.
Right now these are reading like a guide to prolog in the 1980s.
Skills doesn't totally deprecate documenting things in CLAUDE.md but agree that a lot of these can be defined as skills instead.
Skill frontmatter also still sits in the global context so it's not really a token optimization either.
So if youre building your own agent, this would be a directory of markdown documents with headers that you tell the agent to scan so that its aware of them, and then if it thinks they could be useful it can choose to read all the instructions into its context? Is it any more than that?
I guess I dont understand how this isnt just RAG with an index you make the agent aware of?
I think if it literally as a collection of .md files and scripts to help perform some set of actions. I'm excited for it not really as a "new thing" (as mentioned in the post) but as effectively an endorsement for this pattern of agent-data interaction.
Codex writes higher quality code, but is slower and less feature rich. I imagine this will change within months. The jury is still out. Exciting times!
This feels like a false economy to me for real sized changes, but maybe I’m just a weak code reviewer. For code I really don’t care about, I’m happy to do this, but if I ever need to understand that code I have an uphill battle. OTOH reading intermediate diffs and treating the process like actual pair programming has worked well for me, left me with changes I’m happy with, and codebases I understand well enough to debug.
It's much easier to review larger changes when you've aligned on a Claude generated plan up front.
Just to not confuse, MCP is like an api but the underlying api can execute an Skill. So, its not MCP vs Skill as a contest. It's just the broad concept of a "flexible" skill vs "parameter" based Api. And again parameter based APIs can also be flexible depending on how we write it except that it lacks SKILL.md in case of Skills which guides llm to be more generic than a pure API.
By the way, if you are a Mac user, you can execute Skills locally via OpenSkills[1] that I have created using apple contianers.
1. OpenSkills -https://github.com/BandarLabs/open-skills
Are the CLI-based agents better (much better?) than the Cursor app? Why?
I like how easy it is to get Cursor to focus a particular piece of code. I select the text and Cmd-L, saying "fix this part, it's broken like this ____."
I haven't really tried a CLI agent; sending snippets of code by CLI sounds really annoying. "Fix login.ts lines 148-160, it's broken like this ___"
simonw•3h ago
I researched this the other day, the recommended (by Anthropic) way to do this is to have a CLAUDE.md with a single line in it:
Then keep your actual content in the other file: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/claude-code-on-t...raybb•3h ago
simonw•2h ago
Anthropic say "put @AGENTS.md in your CLAUDE.md" file and my own experiments confirmed that this dumps the content into the system prompt in the same way as if you had copied it to CLAUDE.md manually, so I'm happy with that solution - at least until Anthropic give in and support AGENTS.md directly.
j_bum•2h ago
But I can’t speak to it working across OS.
BoiledCabbage•59m ago
I thought git by default treats symlinks simply as file copies when cloning new.
Ie git may not be aware of the symlink.
auscompgeek•24m ago
sshh12•2h ago