.. SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 cusy GmbH .. .. SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause Skills vs. MCP ============== Skills are more efficient `GitHub’s official MCP `_, on the other hand, consumes tens of thousands of context tokens on its own, and as soon as a few more are added, the LLM is left with hardly any room to actually do any useful work. LLMs, on the other hand, know how to call :samp:`{CLI-TOOL} --help`, so we don’t need to use many tokens to describe its usage – the model can figure that out for itself later if necessary. Skills can also be used with other models You can simply take a Skills folder and point Codex CLI or Gemini CLI to it using: .. code-block:: md Read `skills/uv-tdd/SKILL.md` and then create a project structure This will work even though these tools and models have no built-in knowledge of Skills. Skills are more secure The instructions can be executed in :doc:`secure programming environments <../../security/sandboxing>`. Skills are simpler :term:`MCP` is a complete protocol specification featuring hosts, clients, servers, resources, prompts, tools, samples, roots and three different transport protocols: `stdio `_, `streamable HTTP `_ and, originally, `HTTP with SSE `_. Skills, on the other hand, are based on Markdown with a little YAML metadata and some optional scripts that can be executed in the respective environment. They are therefore much closer to the concept of LLMs, as you can simply enter text that the model interprets. .. seealso:: * `Skills compared to MCP `_ by Simon Willison, posted on 16th October 2025