Anthropic's Claude Skills, which are conceptually extremely simple, may become a bigger deal than MCP, whose high token usage is its most significant limitation
Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models:
Simon Willison's WeblogSimon Willison
Context & Ripple Effects
Anthropic’s launch coverage describes Skills as folders containing instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load for particular work. That makes the proposal a lightweight complement to broader model integrations rather than a new model capability in itself.
The release extends Anthropic’s effort to make Claude’s outputs and workflows more usable, following Artifacts’ interactive-result model. The key distinction in this commentary is operational: Skills can target task-specific context while MCP’s token overhead is presented as a practical constraint.
First-order effects
Claude users and builders gain a reusable packaging pattern for task-specific guidance, scripts, and resources through the newly introduced Claude Skills.
MCP is more likely to be judged not only on connectivity and interoperability, but also on the context it consumes in a workflow.
Second-order effects
Tool builders may favor Skills-style bundles for repeatable tasks where minimizing loaded context matters, while reserving MCP connections for cases that require live access to external systems.
Teams evaluating agent workflows will have to compare the convenience of standardized integrations with the ongoing inference cost of the context those integrations require.
Third-order effects
If Skills gain adoption, agent ecosystems could split work between modular, selectively loaded capability packages and broader integration protocols, with token efficiency becoming a meaningful architectural criterion.
The larger shift is toward treating context as a constrained operating resource: successful AI complements may be defined as much by what they avoid loading as by the capabilities they expose.
The trend: AI application tooling is moving toward selective, compute-aware capability packaging as builders seek to expand agent usefulness without continuously increasing context costs.
one of the most important rules in AI is that the best things have the worst names. this is one. we have massively undersold the best tool in the world for Asking Questions About Things At Your Job. everyone here uses it all day. it truly revolutionizes Job
Have felt for a while that ‘LLM AI’ is a combination of language problems and knowledge problems, and that the LLM future is about improving systems for fitting ‘knowledge’ into the little language wordbots — Language is amazing [embedded post]
Simon makes a strong case that Claude's new “Skills” are a compelling pattern for effectively using an LLM's capabilities. — A Skill is a Markdown file with detailed instructions for a specific task. It starts with short header explaining what it does; Claude reads the rest on…
Cool. I feel like skills will soon be replaced by LoRA adapters given that we know a LoRA can provide a similar function to additional context. [embedded post]
Like many of Anthropic's products, Skills are super powerful but (IMO) could use some UI improvements. You have to work with Claude to design a Skill (specific file type), which you then save down as a ZIP file, re-upload, and individually enable in Settings. [image]
Teach @claudeai your Notion playbook. With Notion Skills, you can bundle instructions, scripts, and resources into one file — ready to use across Claude, Claude Code, and the API.
Claude can now do work for you in your exact style and using your exact process. You can “teach” Claude to run a pre-designated workflow on any task - making agents MUCH more useful (time saved on manual formatting alone is huge). Enter...Skills 👇 [video]
Today we're introducing Skills in claude dot ai, Claude Code, and the API. Skills let you package specialized knowledge into reusable capabilities that Claude loads on demand as agents tackle more complex tasks. Here's how they work and why they matter for the future of agents: […
This has the potential to be very great, but I think Claude might be in danger of overcomplicating a lot of stuff - Skills with SKILL.md - Agents with AGENTS.md - Marketplaces - Plugins - Projects All with their own way of doing things. I just wanna chat and not worry about all …
I follow @simonwillison.net for takes like simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/ .... But in this case, I think this is both correct and overblown. — First, a couple of hot takes......
I was already excited about Claude Skills but after reading Simon's blog post I see *even more* potential. In the same way I keep scripts around, I can just make a skill to do things like “download a YouTube video and make it an mp3”, and it will be able to do that without me ha…