Agent-Skills

If you’re building production AI agents in 2026, you’ve almost certainly encountered both MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent Skills as architectural options. Both are ways to extend what an AI agent can do — but they operate at fundamentally different levels of abstraction, and choosing between them (or combining them) is one of the most consequential architectural decisions you’ll make early in a project. This guide breaks down how each approach works, when each excels, the compatibility patterns for using both together, and the production deployment tradeoffs that practitioners are discovering in the field. ...

Google quietly published something very useful on GitHub in early March: gws, a command-line interface for the full Google Workspace API surface. It ships with 100+ pre-built agent skills covering Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar, and Chat — and it includes a built-in MCP server that lets AI clients like Claude Desktop, Gemini CLI, and VS Code access your Workspace directly. This is the thing that used to require a custom OAuth flow, API client library setup, and a day of plumbing. Now it’s a CLI install and a config file. ...

Anthropic has quietly shipped one of the more significant developer-facing features of early 2026: a formal Agent Skills framework that gives Claude agents a structured, reusable way to acquire new capabilities. If you’ve been following the OpenClaw ecosystem, this will feel familiar — OpenClaw’s own SKILL.md-based skill system predated this by months. But Anthropic’s formal framework brings first-party documentation, cross-platform compatibility, and a growing third-party marketplace that changes the calculus for teams building on Claude. ...

Weaviate just shipped something that’s going to change how AI coding agents handle data: Agent Skills, an open-source repository of pre-built capabilities that give Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and Gemini CLI native access to semantic search, vector storage, and multi-agent orchestration blueprints. What Are Agent Skills? Agent Skills are modular, ready-to-use capability bundles that plug directly into AI coding agents. Rather than writing custom tool integrations every time you want an agent to search a vector database or store semantic embeddings, you drop in the relevant Agent Skill and it just works. ...