I think people are looking at skills the wrong way. It's not like it gives it some kind of superpowers it couldn't do otherwise. Ideally you'll have Claude write the skills anyway. It's just a shortcut so you don't have to keep rewriting a prompt all over again and/or have Claude keep figuring out how to do the same thing repeatedly. You can save lots of time, tokens and manual guidance by having well thought skills.
Some people use these to "larp" some kind of different job roles etc and I don't think that's productive use of skills unless the prompts are truly exceptional.
I wouldn't draw such conclusions from one preprint paper. Especially since they measured only success rate, while quite often AGENTS.md exists to improve code quality, which wasn't measured. And even then, the paper concluded that human written AGENTS.md raised success rates.
> then you should create an example repo that shows the playwright CLI and playwright MCP add the same number of tokens to context and that both are equally configurable in this respect
That's just implementation detail of how your agent harness decides to use MCP. CLI and MCP are on different abstraction layers. You can have your MCP available through CLI if you wish so.
This is very developer centric. While Github might have good CLI, there's absolutely no point in having most services develop CLIs and have their non-technical users install those. Not only is it bad UX, but it's bad from security perspective as well. This is like arguing that Github shouldn't have GraphQL/Rest api since everyone should use the CLI.
I feel like some people in this thread are talking about estimates and some are talking about deadlines. Of course we should be able to give estimates. No, they're probably not very accurate. In many industries it makes sense to do whatever necessary to meet the estimate which has become a deadline. While we could do that in software, there often isn't any ramifications of going a bit overtime and producing much more value. Obviously this doesn't apply to all software. Like gamedev, especially before digital distribution.
I think it's obvious that all software teams do some kind of estimates, because it's needed for prioritization. Giving out exact dates as estimates/deadlines is often completely unecessary.
It's certainly not uncommon to cache deps in CI. But at least at some point CircleCI was so slow at saving+restoring cache that it was actually faster to just download all the deps. Generally speaking for small/medium projects installing all deps is very fast and bandwidth is basically free, so it's natural many projects don't cache any of it.
They're not being harrassed. You're basically saying that because FFmpeg doesn't have enough resources to fix all the security vulnerabilities, we should fix it by pretending like there are none.