MCP vs Skills: a practical decision guide for builders I need my agent to do X. Skill or MCP? If you build agents on Claude or anything MCP-compatible, this is the question that actually matters. The two patterns get pitched as alternatives. They are not. They solve different problems. Most production agents need both. Here is the decision rule, the framing for each, and the anti-patterns I keep seeing. The two patterns in 60 seconds MCP (Model Context Protocol). A wire protocol. Your agent talks to an MCP server over JSON-RPC. The server exposes tools, resources, and prompts. The runtime is separate from the agent. Anything live, anything stateful, anything that needs auth or a real connection lives behind MCP. Skills. A folder of markdown that gets loaded into the agent's context. No extra runtime. No protocol. The agent reads the SKILL.md, follows the instructions, executes the steps. Skills are procedural knowledge in a format the agent already knows how to read. That is the whole shape.…