LLMs need prompts. Prompts can get very big very quickly. The so called "skills", which exist in other forms in other platforms outside of Anthropic and OpenAI, are simply a mechanism to extend the prompt dynamically. The tool (scripts) that are part of the skill are no different then simply having the tools already installed in the OS where the agent operates.

The idea behind skills is sound because context management matters.

However, skills are different from MCP. Skills has nothing to do with tool calling at all!

You can implement your own version of skills easily and there is absolutely zero need for any kind of standard or a framework of sorts. They way to do is to register a tool / function to load and extend the base prompt and presto - you have implemented your own version of skills.

In ChatBotKit AI Widget we even have our own version of that for both the server and when building client-side applications.

With client-side applications the whole thing is implemented with a simple react hook that adds the necessary tools to extend the prompt dynamically. You can easily come up with your own implementation of that with 20-30 lines of code. It is not complicated.

Very often people latch on some idea thinking this is the next big thing hoping that it will explode. It is not new and it wont explode! It is just part of a suite of tools that already exist in various forms. The mechanic is so simple at its core that practically makes no sense to call it a standard and there is absolutely zero need to have it for most types of applications. It does make sense for coding assistant though as they work with quite a bit of data so there it matters. But skills are not fundamentally different from *.instruction.md prompt in Copilot or AGENT.md and its variations.

I usually run one agent at a time in an interactive, pair-programming way. Occasionally (like once a week) I have some task where it makes sense to have one agent run for a long time. Then I'll create a separate jj workspace (equivalent of git worktree) and let it run.

I would probably never run a second agent unless I expected the task to take at least two hours, any more than that and the cost of multitasking for my brain is greater than any benefit, even when there are things that I could theoretically run in parallel, like several hypotheses for fixing a bug.

IIRC Thorsten Ball (Writing an Interpreter in Go, lead engineer on Amp) also said something similar in a podcast – he's a single-tasker, despite some of his coworkers preferring fleets of agents.