Skills Over MCP Working Group

⚠️ Experimental — This repository is an incubation space for the Skills Over MCP Working Group. Contents are exploratory and do not represent official MCP specifications or recommendations.

Charter: modelcontextprotocol.io/community/skills-over-mcp/charter — mission, scope, membership, active work items, and success criteria. Project board: Skills Over MCP WG Meeting notes: Skills Over MCP WG discussions Discord: #skills-over-mcp-wg

Why Skills Over MCP?

MCP servers give agents tools, but tools alone are insufficient for complex workflows — tool descriptions tell an agent what a tool does, not how to orchestrate multiple tools to achieve a goal. Skills bridge this gap. They are structured "how-to" knowledge: multi-step workflows, conditional logic, and orchestration instructions that can run to hundreds of lines.

Skills are context, and MCP is a context protocol. Agents already connect to remote services over MCP to get tools — they can get the know-how to use those tools through the same channel. A remote MCP server can serve both its tools and the instructions for using them together, as a single atomic unit. This also enables automatic discovery (connect to a server, find its skills), dynamic updates (server-side changes flow without reinstall), multi-server composition (skills orchestrating tools across servers), and enterprise distribution (RBAC, multi-tenant, version-adaptive content) — all through infrastructure MCP servers already provide.

See why-and-when.md for the full value proposition and a guide for when MCP distribution applies vs. simpler alternatives.

Problem Statement

Native "skills" support in host applications demonstrates demand for rich workflow instructions, but there's no convention for exposing equivalent functionality through MCP primitives. Current limitations include:

• Server instructions load only at initialization — new or updated skills require re-initializing the server
• Complex workflows exceed practical instruction size — some skills require hundreds of lines of markdown with references to bundled files
• No discovery mechanism — users installing MCP servers don't know if there's a corresponding skill they should also install
• Multi-server orchestration — skills may need to coordinate tools from multiple servers

See problem-statement.md for full details.

Repository Contents

Document	Description
Problem Statement	Current limitations and gaps
Why Skills Over MCP?	Value proposition and decision guide
Use Cases	Key use cases driving this work
Approaches	Approaches being explored (not mutually exclusive)
Open Questions	Unresolved questions with community input
Experimental Findings	Results from implementations and testing
Related Work	SEPs, implementations, and external resources
Decision Log	Record of key decisions with context and rationale

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to participate.