Why agent SKILLs are worth the tokens: a practical breakdown
ievkz · reddit · 2026-10-25
The author initially dismissed SKILLs as token waste, but changed their mind after practice, citing four core advantages over MCP:
- No context bloat: each SKILL only puts its name and description (100-200 tokens) into context, loading full content on demand—30 SKILLs are fine, while 30 MCP servers eat tens of thousands of tokens.
- Covers niche tools: LLMs know Git and Python out of the box, but for internal/proprietary tools with no public docs, a SKILL.md saves the agent from web searching.
- Encodes business processes: agents can run tests, but don't know how your company ships releases; a SKILL can encode the exact release checklist.
- A toolkit, not just instructions: scripts, docs, and templates can ship inside a SKILL, executed or read on demand without burning tokens.
The realization came while writing SKILLs for their own planning tool, blueprint4llm.
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