[extr]

It’s crazy how Anthropic keeps coming up with sticky “so simple it seems obvious” product innovations and OpenAI plays catch up. MCP is barely a protocol. Skills are just md files. But they seem to have a knack for framing things in a way that just makes sense.

[Jimmc414]

Skills are lazy loaded prompt engineering. They are simple, but powerful. Claude sees a one line index entry per skill. You can create hundreds. The full instructions only load when invoked.

Those instructions can reference external scripts that Claude executes without loading the source. You can package them with hooks and agents in plugins. You pay tokens for the output, not the code that calls it.

Install five MCPs and you've burned a large chunk of tokens before typing a prompt. With skills, you only pay for what you use.

You can call deterministic code (pipelines, APIs, domain logic) with a non-deterministic model, triggered by plain language, without the context bloat.

[robrenaud]

They are the LLM whisperers.

In the same way Nagel knew what it was like to be a bat, Anthropic has the highest fraction of people who approximately know what it's like to be a frontier ai model.

[gabaix]

Nagel's point is that he could not know what it was like to be a bat.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Huh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

[uoaei]

It's surprising to me that Anthropic's CEO is the only one getting real recognition for their advances. The people around him seem to be as or more crucial for their mission.

[altmanaltman]

> https://www.anthropic.com/news/donating-the-model-context-pr...

This is a prime example of what you're saying. Creating a "foundation" for a protocol created an year ago that's not even a protocol

Has the Gavin Belson tecthics energy

[sigmoid10]

Anthropic is in a bit of a rough spot if you look at the raw data points we have available. Their valuation is in the same order of magnitude as OpenAI, but they have orders of magnitude fewer users. And current leaderboards for famous unsolved benchmarks like ARC AGI and HLE are also dominated by Google and OpenAI. Announcements like the one you linked are the only way for Anthropic to stay in the news cycle and justify its valuation to investors. Their IPO rumours are yet another example of this. But I really wonder how long that strategy can keep working.

[DonHopkins]

I just re-binge-watched Silicon Valley in its entirety, with the benefit of a decade of hindsight, so I could get all the interconnected characters and sub-plots and cultural references together in my head better than the first time I watched it in real time at one episode per month.

It really should be required viewing for anyone in the industry, it has so much spot-on social commentary, it's just not "tecthical" not to be fully aware of it, even if it stings.

https://silicon-valley.fandom.com/wiki/Tethics

>Meanwhile, Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) comes up with a code of ethics for tech, which he lamely calls "tethics", and urges all tech CEOs to sign a pledge to abide by the tethics code. Richard refuses to sign, he considers the pledge to be unenforceable and meaningless.

>Belson invites Richard to the inauguration of the Gavin Belson Institute for Tethics. Before Belson's speech, Richard confronts the former Hooli CEO with the fact that the tethics pledge is a stream of brazenly plagiarized banalities, much like Belson's novel Cold Ice Cream & Hot Kisses.

>Once at the podium, Belson discards his planned speech and instead confesses to his misdeeds when he was CEO of Hooli. Belson urges California's attorney general to open an investigation.

>Richard mistakenly thinks that Belson is repentant for all his past bad behavior. But, as Ron LaFlamme (Ben Feldman) explains, Belson's contrite act is just another effort to sandbag Richard. If the attorney general finds that Belson acted unethically during his tenure as Hooli CEO, the current Hooli CEO would be the one who has to pay the fine. And since Pied Piper absorbed Hooli, it would be Pied Piper that has to pay the fine.

[beng-nl]

Tethics, Denpok.

[mhalle]

Skills are not just markdown files. They are markdown files combined with code and data, which only work universally when you have a general purpose cloud-based code execution environment.

Out of the box Claude skills can call python scripts that load modules from Pypi or even GitHub, potentially ones that include data like sqlite files or parquet tables.

Not just in Claude Code. Anywhere, including the mobile app.

[rcarmo]

They’re not alone in that.

[lacy_tinpot]

Their name is Anthropic. Their entire schtick is a weird humanization of AIs.

MCP/Tool use, Skills, and I'm sure others that I can't think of.

This is might be because of some core direction that is more coherent than other labs.

[JoshuaDavid]

... I am pretty sure that the name "Anthropic" is as in "principle" not as in "pertaining to human beings".

[losvedir]

MCP is a terribly designed (and I assume vibe-designed) protocol. Give me the requirements that an LLM needs to be able to load tools dynamically from another server and invoke them like an RPC, and I could give you a much simpler, better solution.

The modern HTTP Streamable version is light-years better, but took a year and was championed by outside engineers faced with the real problem of integrating it, and I imagine was designed by a human.

OpenAI was there first, but unfortunately the models weren't quite good enough yet, so their far superior approach unfortunately didn't take off.

[smokel]

Also, MCP is a serious security disaster. Too simple, I'd wager.

[valzam]

Id argue that this isn't so much a fault of the MCP spec but how 95% of AI 'engineers' have no engineering background. MCP is just an OpenAPI spec. It's the same as any other API. If you are exposing sensitive data without any authz/n that's on the developer.

[sam_lowry_]

complex is synonym of insecure

[brazukadev]

MCP biggest problem is not being simple

[nl]

Also `CLAUDE.md` (which is `AGENTS.md` everywhere? else now)

[msy]

I get the impression the innovation drivers at OpenAI have all moved on and the people that have moved in were the ones chasing the money, the rest is history.

[nrhrjrjrjtntbt]

The RSS of AI

[uoaei]

I like this line of analogy. The next obvious step would be IRC (or microservices?) of AI (for co-reasoning) which could offer the space for specialized LLMs rather than the current approach of monoliths.

[speakspokespok]

I noticed something like this earlier, in the android app you can have it rewrite a paragraph, and then and only then do you have the option to send that as a text message. It's just a button that pops up. Claude has an elegance to it.

[ivape]

It’s the only AI company that isn’t monetize at all costs. I’m curious how deep their culture goes as it’s remarkable they even have any discernible value system in today’s business world.

[rcarmo]

Well, my MCP servers only really started working when I implemented the prompt endpoints, so I’m happy I’ll never have to use MCP again if this sticks.

[blitzar]

Anthropic are using Ai beyond the chat window. Without external information, context and tools the "magic" of Ai evaporates after a few minutes.

[baxtr]

A good example of:

Build things and then talk about them in a way that people remember and share it with friends.

I guess some call it clever product marketing.

[extr]

Oh yeah I forgot the biggest one. Claude fucking code. Lol

[baby]

I was very skeptical about anything not OpenAI for a while, and then discovered Claude code, Anthropic blogposts, etc. It's basically the coolest company in the field.

[_pdp_]

I hate to be that guy but skills are not an invention of sorts. It a simple mechanism that exists already in many places.

The biggest unlock was tool calling that was in invented at OpenAI.

[simonw]

I'd credit tool calling to the ReAct paper, which was Princeton CA and Google DeepMind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629

[CuriouslyC]

Anthropic has good marketing, but ironically their well marketed mediocre ideas retard development of better standards.