Skills vs MCP. What’s the difference and when should you use each? #maven #ai #claude #claudeskills

What's the difference between skills and MCP? Let's start with what a skill actually is. A skill is just a folder of instructions that an AI pulls in when it actually needs it. It has two main parts. First is the front matter, the name of the skill and a short description of what it does. This is all that gets loaded in when an agent starts running. Second, the body, detailed instructions, scripts, additional resources, everything that's actually part of the skill. So instead of loading everything up front, we only load in the name and description until the agent decides to invoke that skill. Now second, we have MCP. This is an actual server, not just a collection of files. MCP servers inject all of the available tools and descriptions into the agent's context on startup. This means everything gets loaded up front. This takes up a lot of context. Even though modern large language models do have large context windows, the more context you include, the more the performance tends to degrade. But aside from that, they also have different capabilities. For example, an MCP server might give an agent access to Google Drive, create file, delete file, update file. A skill might teach Claude how to write a great product requirements doc within a Google Drive doc. It does not give it the capability to execute the API, but it does tell it how to structure the document, best practices and what tools it might want to use. So MCP gives raw tools and capabilities while skills give behavior. If you want a deeper breakdown of the differences and when to use each, this free lecture is an amazing starting point. Comment skills and I'll send the link.