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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

You don't need MCP if you can instead drop in a skill markdown file that says "to access the GitHub API, use curl against api.github.com and send the GITHUB_API_KEY environment variable in the authorization header. Here are some examples. Consult github-api.md for more."

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I would much, much rather provide discreet APIs directly to the LLM via MCP than just tell it to hit the api and figure it out from the docs.

> You don't need MCP

Depends on who the user is...

A difference/advantage of MCP is that it can be completely server-side. Which means that an average person can "install" MCP tools into their desktop or Web app by pointing it to a remote MCP server. This person doesn't want to install and manage skills files locally. And they definitely don't want to run python scripts locally or run a sandbox vm.

Am I the only person left that is still impressed that we have a natural language understanding system so good that its own tooling and additions are natural language?

I still can't believe we can tell a computer to "use playwright Python to test this new feature page" and it will figure it out successfully most of the time!

Impressing, but I can't believe we went from fixing bugs to coffee-grounds-divination-prompt-guessing-and-tweaking when things don't actually go well /s

That's going to be a lot less efficient context-wise and computing-wise than using either a purpose-built MCP or skill based around executing a script.

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