MCP Is Not the Product — Reusable Skills Are

Right now, a lot of people are talking about MCP. And I get why. It’s a clean idea: connect an AI agent to tools, data, and actions through a standard interface, and suddenly the model can actually do things. That matters. But I think a lot of people are still confusing the plumbing with the product. MCP is useful. MCP is not the product. The product is what happens after the connection exists. The product is a reusable skill. Tools are not enough Giving an agent access to tools sounds powerful. But in practice, raw tool access is messy. If you just hand an agent ten tools, you usually get one of these outcomes: it uses the wrong one it uses the right one in the wrong order it calls the same thing three times with weak assumptions it produces output that technically worked, but isn’t reusable That’s because tools are still too low-level. A tool is a capability. A skill is a workflow. That difference is everything. A simple example I’ve seen this in boring, practical work more than once