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This article could really mostly be reduced to the last two paragraphs, but then it calls skills "over-engineered". Skills are basically just having the agent read the front matter with instructions to read the rest if a given skill seems useful in a given context... I don't know how it could be more minimal.

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(I'm the author)

Looking at the post again, I think I agree that calling Claude Skills overengineered is too harsh. I think Skills is definitely an improvement over MCP.

However I still think it's a generally a mistake to put useful commands and documentation in AI-specific files. In my opinion a better approach is to optimize the organization of docs and commands for human usability, and teach the AI how to leverage those.

I do use Claude Skills, but only to wire up just commands. I wrote a little package to do this automatically: https://github.com/tombedor/just-claude

There's no reason they need to be treated as AI specific. They're just a description in markdown with a tiny frontmatter after all.

Yes, it reduced the author's credibility; it seems that whatever the accuracy is of some is their MCP criticism, they just like criticizing things.

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