Comment by parpfish 2 days ago
I refuse to learn all the complicated configuration because none of it will matter when they drop the next model.
Things that need special settings now won’t in the future and vice versa.
It’s not worth investing a bunch of time into learning features and prompting tricks that will be obsoleted soon
That's a rational argument. In practice, what we're actually doing for the most part is managing context, and creating programs to run parts of tasks, so really the system prompts and builtin tools and settings have very little relevance.
i don't understand this mcp/skill distinction? one of the mcps i use indexes the runtime dependency of code modules so that claude can refactor without just blindly grepping.
how would that be a "skill"? just wrap the mcp in a cli?
fwiw this may be a skill issue, pun intended, but i can't seem to get claude to trigger skills, whereas it reaches for mcps more... i wonder if im missing something. I'm plenty productive in claude though.
So MCPs are a bunch of, essenntially skill type objects. But it has to tell you about all of them, and information about all of them up front.
So a Skill is just a smaller granulatrity level of that concept. It's just one of the individual things an MCP can do.
This is about context management at some level. When you need to do a single thing within that full list of potential things, you don't need the instructions about a ton of other unrelated things in the context.
So it's just not that deep. It would be having a python script or whatever that the skill calls that returns the runtime dependencies and gives them back to the LLM so they can refactor without blindly greping.
Does that make sense?
In our experience, a lot of it is feel and dev preference. After talking to quite a few developers, we've found the skill was the easiest to get started with, but we also have a CLI tool and an MCP server too. You can check out the docs if you'd prefer to try those - feedback welcome: https://www.ensue-network.ai/docs#cli-tool
yeah but a skill without the mcp server is just going to be super inefficient at certain things.
again going to my example, a skill to do a dependency graph would have to do a complex search. and in some languages the dependency might be hidden by macros/reflection etc which would obscure a result obtained by grep
how would you do this with a skill, which is just a text file nudging the llm whereas the MCP's server goes out and does things.
I wish that were true. Models don't feel like they've really had massive leaps.
They do get better, but not enough to change any of the configuration I have.
But you are correct, there is a real possibility that the time invested with be obsolete at some point.
For sure the work towards MCPs are basically obsolete via skills. These things happen.