Claude Code Skills offer 100x lower context cost than MCP for procedural knowledge

Short summary

Anthropic's Agent Skills are markdown files with YAML frontmatter that use three-tier progressive loading: metadata (~50 tokens, always loaded), instructions (<5k tokens, loaded on relevance), and resources (loaded on reference). This makes them roughly 1/100th the context cost of MCP tool schemas for procedural knowledge. The author argues the ecosystem is unbundling MCP: keep it for live data connections, move procedural knowledge to skills, and call CLIs directly for tool access.

• •Agent Skills use 3-tier progressive loading at ~1/100th the context cost of MCP schemas
• •Skills replace procedural-knowledge MCP servers; keep MCP only for live data connections
• •Ecosystem is quietly unbundling MCP into skills, CLIs, and live-data connectors

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