[outlore]

I'm struggling to see how this is different from prepackaged prompts. Simon's article talks about skill metadata being used by the model to look up the full prompt as a way to save on context usage. That is analogous to the model calling --help when it needs to use a CLI tool without needing to load up the full man pages ahead of time.

But couldn't an MCP server expose a "help" tool?

[GoatInGrey]

It's the fact that a collection of files are tied to a specific task or action. Prompts are only injected context, whereas files can be more selectively loaded into context.

What they're trying to do here is translate MCP servers to something more broadly useable by the population. They cannot differentiate themselves with model training anymore, so they have been focusing more and more on tooling development to grow revenue.

[throwup238]

That’s pretty much all it is. If you look at the docs it even uses a bash script to read the skill markdown files into the context.

I think the big difference is that now you can include scripts in these skills that can be executed as part of the skill, in a VM on their servers.