Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

A skill is a Markdown file telling the model how to do something, optionally accompanied by extra documents and pre-written scripts.

Practitioner synthesis of Anthropic's Agent Skills feature, arguing the markdown-file pattern is conceptually simpler and more token-efficient than MCP, and that the ease of sharing a single file is the feature.

Makes visible the argument that the markdown-skill pattern is a diffusion mechanism, not only a technical one. Pair with Tan (thin harness) and Anthropic's engineering post to triangulate what 'skills' actually refer to.

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Willison argues two things at once: 1. Conceptual simplicity beats MCP. A skill is a markdown file; the model knows how to read markdown; a CLI tool with --help solves most of what an MCP server solves, at a fraction of the token budget. 2. Distribution is the feature. Many skills are a single file. The shareability is the point — skills spread. Read as a synthesis node that connects: • Anthropic's Agent Skills announcement — the institutional launch of the pattern. • Tan, "Thin Harness, Fat Skills" — the practitioner ethos that the markdown-skills pattern operationalises. • HumanLayer, "Skill Issue" — what harness-engineering work remains around skills.