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 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:

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 secure programming environments.

Skills are simpler

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.