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Enhance design principles and open questions documentation with community insights on skills as context and discoverability challenges

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olaservo 2026-02-07 19:19:49 -07:00
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docs/approaches.md
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Whatever approach is adopted, community members have highlighted several principles:
> "There should be intentional focus on making it easy for server authors to create and expose skills... client hosts are strongly incentivized to have a relatively uniform way to discover and consume them — at least from the point of view of a server author — while also leaving room for client host innovation." — [Peder Holdgaard Pedersen](https://github.com/PederHP)
> "There should be intentional focus on making it easy for server authors to create and expose skills... client hosts are strongly incentivized to have a relatively uniform way to discover and consume them — at least from the point of view of a server author — while also leaving room for client host innovation.
>
> I also don't like creating dichotomy between first-class skills and skills as context, because pretty much everything an MCP server exposes is context. Skills-as-resources is much more accurate." — [Peder Holdgaard Pedersen](https://github.com/PederHP)
Additional design considerations raised by community members:
- **MCP is fundamentally about context, not just tools.** Skills are part of a broader challenge around context-as-resources discoverability and standardization of client host behavior. Framing skills as context-as-resources avoids creating artificial hierarchies between skills and other MCP primitives.
- **Don't be too prescriptive about client host behavior.** Client hosts may want to innovate on how skills are utilized (e.g., progressive disclosure) and what they can even *be*. The goal is uniform discovery and consumption patterns from the server author's perspective, while leaving room for client-side innovation.
- **Don't assume how tool paradigms will evolve.** The conceptual surface of skills shouldn't bake in assumptions about how tools develop. That doesn't preclude skills being implemented as a well-known tool, but the design should not couple skills to any particular tool evolution path.
## Central Tension: Convention vs. Protocol Extension