Skills Over MCP Interest Group

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

Mission

This Interest Group explores how "agent skills" (rich, structured instructions for agent workflows) can be discovered and consumed through MCP. Native skills support in host applications demonstrates strong demand, but the community hasn't aligned on whether existing MCP primitives suffice or what conventions to standardize. Cross-cutting collaboration is needed because solutions touch the protocol spec, registry schema, SDK implementations, and client behavior.

Scope

In Scope

• Requirements gathering: Documenting use cases, constraints, and gaps in current MCP primitives for skill distribution
• Pattern exploration: Testing and evaluating approaches (skills as tools, resources, registry metadata, protocol primitives)
• Coordination: Bridging discussions across Registry WG, Agents WG, and external stakeholders (Agent Skills spec owners, FastMCP, PydanticAI)
• Proof of concepts: Maintaining a shared repo of reference implementations and experimental findings

Out of Scope

• Approving spec changes: This IG does not have authority to approve protocol changes; recommendations flow through the SEP process
• Registry schema decisions: Coordinate with Registry WG; this IG explores requirements but doesn't own the schema
• Client implementation mandates: We can document patterns but not require specific client behavior
• Plugin/bundle packaging: Some use cases surface a broader need for installable bundles (skills + servers + subagents + configuration as a single artifact). How to solve for this is out of scope.

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
Meeting Notes	Published after each working session
Contributing	How to participate

Stakeholder Groups

Group	Overlap
Agents WG	How agents consume server metadata, skill activation
Registry WG	Skills discovery/distribution, registry schema changes
Primitive Grouping WG	Progressive disclosure patterns

Facilitators

Role	Name	Organization	GitHub
Maintainer	Ola Hungerford	Nordstrom / MCP Maintainer	@olaservo
Facilitator	Bob Dickinson	TeamSpark.ai	@BobDickinson
Facilitator	Rado	Stacklok / MCP Maintainer	@rdimitrov
Facilitator	Yu Yi	Google	@erain
Facilitator	Ozz	Stacklok	@JAORMX
Facilitator	Kaxil Naik	Astronomer / Apache Airflow PMC	@kaxil

Lifecycle

Current Status: Active Exploration

Graduation Criteria (IG → WG)

This IG may propose becoming a Working Group if:

• Clear consensus emerges on an approach requiring sustained spec work
• Cross-cutting coordination requires formal authority delegation
• At least two Core Maintainers sponsor WG formation

Retirement Criteria

• Problem space resolved (conventions established, absorbed into other WGs)
• Insufficient participation to maintain momentum
• Community consensus that skills don't belong in MCP protocol scope

Work Tracking

Item	Status	Champion	Notes
Requirements alignment	In Progress	All facilitators	Review approaches, identify common requirements and gaps
Agent Skills spec coordination	In Progress	Ola	Use agentskills/agentskills Discussions for intersecting topics; see contributing guide
Experimental findings repo	Proposed	Ola	Dedicated repo for implementations and evaluation results
SEP-2076 review	In Progress	Yu Yi	Skills as first-class primitive proposal
Registry skills.json proposal	In Progress	Ozz	Skills metadata in registry schema
MCP Skills Convention v0.1	Proposed	TBD	Documented pattern (not spec) for skills over existing primitives

Success Criteria

• Short-term: Documented consensus on requirements and evaluation of existing approaches
• Medium-term: Clear recommendation (convention vs. protocol extension vs. both)
• Long-term: Interoperable skill distribution across MCP servers and clients