MCP Is Overengineered, Skills Are Too Primitive

lobu.ai

3 points·buremba··6 comments

"Over 100,000 packages on Nixpkgs. Every CLI tool you can think of. Installed declaratively, cached across container restarts, no Docker rebuild."

Mrs. Holbrook, who gave me a D in high school English, would point out that there isn't a single sentence there. On the other hand, I've had times when I made most of my income by writing. What do you want, good grammar or good taste?

Back when MCP first came out, AI wasn't this smart, so you had to give it the exact tools it needed. Now, it feels like it’s just a gateway. Skills might look simple since they're built to be highly composable, but they’re definitely the 'in' thing right now, so they're worth looking into.

They're composable but computers are not. Two skills might depend on a different version of a dependency which is pretty hard to maintain and their needs to be a deterministic system (agents are not) to resolve the conflicts and make sure two skills can live in the same environment.

If you are using Python it should be creating separate venv's for different skills. It is 2016, uv can install any version of Python you need.

I extensively use uv (IMO better than venv) but still it's Python specific and not universal. npm is much worse and native binaries are almost impossible to deal with multiple versions.

nix is specifically targeting this use-case and it'e extensively used by vendors like Replit.

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