servers VS agentskills

Most agents don't speak raw HTTP — they speak MCP. So the real distribution surface is a tiny MCP server that exposes each endpoint as a tool and does the paying under the hood. The agent calls web_search(query); the server hits the paid endpoint, handles the 402 with its operator's wallet, returns JSON. One line to install:

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI hosts (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, and others) to external context and actions through a structured protocol instead of ad-hoc plugins.

Model Context Protocol specification

That changed when I built mpesa-mcp — a Model Context Protocol server that wraps the Daraja API and makes it directly available to Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini.

If you haven't run into it yet, MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard for exposing tools to AI agents. two-go ships an MCP server that runs over stdio with no dependencies, no URL, no account, and no API key. It's all local.

MCP server surface. The CLI is already agent-friendly, so I'm double minded about whether a Model Context Protocol server would make integration smoother. I'm personally not a fan of MCP and prefer skills and CLIs.

As noted in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) Introduction, this protocol allows Claude to interact with systems like GitHub and local databases through a standardized interface.

Keep the project's living context: current task state, decisions, conventions, known footguns as plain Markdown committed to the repo, and expose it to the agent over MCP.

The MCP ecosystem doubles every few months. Bookmark the official MCP servers repository for the canonical list.

tl;dr - yes, the current term de jour is "context engineering", which ironically involves "skill" writing among other things. There is definitely a way to prompt/message them, such as asking questions or not cursing at them.

Read Antropic blog/docs, they have among the best knowledge share. These too:

https://agents.md

https://agentskills.io/

While tools handle actions, skills handle behavior. A skill is a reusable set of instructions or a workflow that tells an agent how to perform a specific type of task well.

There is also an Agent Skills bundle in the repo that teaches your coding agent to use the CLI properly. Drop it into your OpenCode, OpenClaw, or Claude Code skills directory and the agent learns to prefer --json, branch on exit codes, and read status --json before configuring an OpenAI-compatible client.

Here's the detail that turns a nice feature into an industry shift. The skill format isn't a Hermes invention or a Nous Research lock-in. It was originally developed by Anthropic, released as an open standard, and it has since been adopted by a genuinely surprising list of tools: Claude Code, Cursor, OpenAI's Codex, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Goose, OpenHands, Letta, and a few dozen more.

It's built as an Agent Skill, so you install it as a skill and don't touch the agent itself. It turned out better than I expected, so I open-sourced it.

Skills, the procedural memory layer. Anthropic's skills documentation covers the platform-native version. The open standard at agentskills.io makes skills portable across agents — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, the Hermes orchestrator from yesterday's piece. A skill captures a pattern you have already executed enough times to formalize.

@shopify/ucp-cli is agent-first by design. Every command takes and returns structured JSON, so a model can compose payloads and parse results without scraping human-readable output. ucp skills add installs a bundled SKILL.md — the operating manual that teaches an agent when to search versus discover, how to render totals, how to surface required disclosures, and when to hand off to a human. The full command surface mirrors the UCP shopping service:

Anthropic formalized the skills concept for Claude Code, and the format is now an open standard gaining adoption across AI coding tools. The refund scenario above could be expressed as in the following example:

An open standard. The format is published at agentskills.io, so the same SKILL.md file works across more than just Claude. Community marketplaces collectively list more than 4,000 skills as of May 2026. The official source remains github.com/anthropics/skills.

They're folders of instructions, scripts, and reference materials that Claude loads on demand. They live in .claude/skills/ and follow the Agent Skills open standard, which means they work across Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and others.