Skills are static; MCP servers is dynamic. Skills codify info and workflows, help decrease redundant instructions, and increase consistent outcomes. MCP servers allow access to changing resources across systems.
You may dislike MCP, and there are certainly valid arguments to be made there, but that doesn't mean you can replace it with skills. If you could replace a given MCP server with a skill it would only indicate that someone misunderstood the assignment and chose the wrong tool in the first place. It wouldn't indicate the superiority of one thing over the other.
This whole article, and it's current rank on HN (#5), is making me feel like I took crazy pills this morning. A colleague suggests this Skills vs MCP discourse is big on Twitter, so maybe I lack the necessary background to appreciate this, but aren't these different tools, solving for different things, in different ways? Is this parody? Am I falling into a bot engagement trap by even responding to this? The article certainly reads like LinkedIn drivel, with vague, emphatic opinions about nothing.
My company is currently porting a critical app to React, yet I feel similar to you on most of your points. The app in question is currently using Angular 9, so a fairly similar beast. But React, by comparison, is worse in most ways IMO. The ugly syntax forced by JSX, the combination of template and logic together in 1 file, the odd forcing of certain unintuitive abstraction patterns while also claiming to be "not opinionated" about other crucial aspects of how an app works, and I certainly agree it is not special.
However, your argument starts to erode for me when you claim you'd rather spend a few months to build your own moat. You're not just choosing to incur that cost once when you build it. You're incurring a multi-month charge of developer cost that doesn't result in anything being produced for every dev you add to the team, as they have to learn the ins and outs of your proprietary abstraction without the aid of any documentation (assuming) or community to help when they get stuck. This also means a large part of your time is now spent reactively answering pings for special case questions and "what does this opaque error mean" and "how come this thing doesn't work when I do that thing"? And good luck hiring devs who are excited to work on your special creation, not to mention how you have to adapt your hiring process to determine who will be likely to succeed in such an environment. That sounds like a lot of stress to place on a fledgling company trying to grow at a crucial stage and could certainly be a contributing factor in your post-mortem when things don't work out.
By contrast, by advertising for React vs Angular devs we can expand our candidate pool 5-10x and anticipate reduced ramp up time and increased velocity out of the gate. And since hiring and growing my team is one of the most expensive and difficult things I'm grappling with, that's what I'm optimizing for. In the battle between pragmatism and idealism, pragmatism wins the day once again.
> I understand the health implications of being a nicotine user but… if you wish to smoke…
Conflating nicotine use and smoking suggests you do NOT understand the health implications. Even though the 2 have historically been close to intertwined they're not the same thing. This mentality is understandable due to years of frightening PSAs but it's inaccurate and precisely why issues like this hiring policy arise.
Please note that Uhaul is not banning smoking/smokers, they're banning nicotine, which is a stimulant similar to caffeine. The difference is that historically the most prevalent delivery mechanism for nicotine has been to smoke it, and therein lies the health concern. Some might say this is merely a theoretical difference, since portable vape cartridges also contain potentially harmful additives, but this is more of an economic problem - like cigarettes, it's cheaper to include, or fail to exclude, additives that are harmful to humans when vaporized and ingested. However, there's no technical reason a product couldn't come to market tomorrow that would offer a nicotine delivery mechanism free of side effects. But we'll never find out because for years nicotine has been lumped together with smoking as a terrible harmful thing, and that's simply not true.
Thrilling | full stack/frontend engineers | full-time | LA, NY, SF or US REMOTE | https://shopthrilling.com
At Thrilling we're helping traditional brick-and-mortar vintage apparel stores sell their clothing online for the first time. Vintage and secondhand clothing has a huge role to play in improving the environmental impact of the Fashion industry, and by partnering with local stores we can leverage their unique, curated inventories and help small business owners to compete in the global economy. We aim to do good, and do well. Our name comes from the thrill of the hunt, and we're working to bring the same excitement of shopping the best vintage stores, online. Read more about us here:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/amphtml/325805
We're looking for engineers 2 & 3 to join me and the rest of our small and growing team to help us change the landscape of online vintage and secondhand shopping. We need hungry self-starters with prior experience shipping production software. Fashion is a diverse industry and we reflect and value that at our company. Having recently closed our seed round of funding we're rapidly expanding. Our software projects include an app for efficient uploading of products and inventory management, as well as our customer-facing ecom marketplace. In addition to building out those systems there are new ones to create that have yet to be specced. Your work will have a massive impact on our growth and success.
Here's some of the tools we currently use: Angular, TypeScript, Ionic, GraphQL, GitHub, Jira, Firebase, Google Cloud, Heroku, Imgix, and many others.
Here's some of the areas we're expanding into: ML, computer vision, recommendation systems, and always, always killer UX.
Thrilling | full stack/frontend engineers | full-time | REMOTE or LA, NY, SF | https://shopthrilling.com
At Thrilling we're helping traditional brick-and-mortar vintage apparel stores sell their clothing online for the first time. Vintage and secondhand clothing has a huge role to play in improving the environmental impact of the Fashion industry, and by partnering with local stores we can leverage their unique, curated inventories and help small business owners compete in the global economy. We aim to do good, and do well. Our name comes from the thrill of the hunt, and we're working to bring the same excitement of shopping the best vintage stores, online. Read more about us here:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/amphtml/325805
We're looking for engineers 2 & 3 to join me and the rest of our small and growing team to help us change the landscape of online vintage and secondhand shopping. We need hungry self-starters with some prior software dev experience. Fashion is a diverse industry and we reflect and value that at our company. Having recently closed our seed round of funding we're rapidly expanding. We've built an app for efficient uploading of products and inventory management, as well as our customer-facing ecom marketplace. In addition to building out those systems there are new ones to create that have yet to be specced. Your work will have a massive impact on our growth and success.
Here's some of the tools we use: TypeScript, Angular, Ionic, GitHub, Jira, GraphQL, Google Cloud, Heroku, Firebase, Imgix, Sketch.
Here's some of the areas we're expanding into: ML, computer vision, recommendation systems, and always, always killer UX.
You may dislike MCP, and there are certainly valid arguments to be made there, but that doesn't mean you can replace it with skills. If you could replace a given MCP server with a skill it would only indicate that someone misunderstood the assignment and chose the wrong tool in the first place. It wouldn't indicate the superiority of one thing over the other.
This whole article, and it's current rank on HN (#5), is making me feel like I took crazy pills this morning. A colleague suggests this Skills vs MCP discourse is big on Twitter, so maybe I lack the necessary background to appreciate this, but aren't these different tools, solving for different things, in different ways? Is this parody? Am I falling into a bot engagement trap by even responding to this? The article certainly reads like LinkedIn drivel, with vague, emphatic opinions about nothing.