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MCPs feel complicated. Skills seem to me like the simplest possible design for a mechanism for adding extra capabilities to an existing coding agent.

Can skills completely replace MCPs? For example, can a skill be configured to launch my local Python program in its own venv. I don’t want Claude to spend time spinning up a runtime

Skills only work if you have a code environment up and running and available for a coding agent to execute commands in.

You can absolutely have a skill that tells the coding agent how to use Python with your preferred virtual environment mechanism.

I ended up solving that in a slightly different way - I have a Claude hook that spits attempts to run "python" or "python3" and returns an error saying "use uv run instead".

I tell Claude to make its own skills. “Which part of this task is worth making a skill for, use your skill making skill to do it”

If we aren’t in the take off phase, I don’t know where we are

Skills are just pointers to context so you don't need to load all of them upfront, it is as simple as that. By the way cursor rules is effectively the same as agents.md.