[irrationalfab]

Agent/MCP/Skills might be "Netscape-y" in the sense that today's formats will evolve fast. But Netscape still mattered: it lost the market, not the ideas. The patterns survived (JavaScript, cookies, SSL/TLS, progressive rendering) and became best practices we take for granted.

The durable pattern here isn't a specific file format. It's on-demand capability discovery: a small index with concise metadata so the model can find what's available, then pull details only when needed. That's a real improvement over tool calling and MCP's "preload all tools up front" approach, and it mirrors how humans work. Even as models bake more know-how into their weights, novel capabilities will always be created faster than retraining cycles. And even if context becomes unlimited, preloading everything up front remains wasteful when most of it is irrelevant to the task at hand.

So even if "Skills" gets replaced, discoverability and progressive disclosure likely survive.