Explainer

Agent skills and MCP servers are not the same thing.

They get used interchangeably, they need the same governance, and the difference matters the first time somebody gets access they should not have.

What an agent knows

Skills

A skill is a markdown file — usually SKILL.md — plus whatever it references. It is knowledge, written down, in a place the agent will read it.

Concretely, the ones teams write most often:

How your month-end close works, step by step, with the actual account names.
The house style for a database migration, including the two things nobody remembers.
The tone support replies in, and the three phrases you never use.
What your on-call runbook says, so the agent stops inventing one.

Skills are portable. Any client that reads SKILL.md can use one, which is why the format is worth staying inside rather than inventing something proprietary.

What an agent can do

MCP servers

An MCP server exposes real capability over the Model Context Protocol: query this warehouse, open that ticket, deploy to staging. The catalog entry is the server's configuration and the credentials it needs.

Concretely:

A read-only warehouse connection the data team gets and nobody else does.
The ticket system, so an agent can file rather than describe.
A staging deployer scoped to the two people who should be able to run it.

The blast radius is different. A wrong skill wastes an afternoon; a wrong server can write to production. Entitlement matters more here than anywhere else.

One policy model, because the questions are identical.

Who owns this? Which version is live? Who is entitled to it? Who pulled it and when? How do we turn it off? Those five questions do not change depending on whether the object is a paragraph of instructions or a database connection, so it would be strange to answer them in two different systems.

Skill Belt treats both as catalog objects with an owner, a version, a group, an audit trail and a kill switch. That is the entire model, and keeping it that small is deliberate.

Is a skill just a prompt?

It is a prompt with a file path, a name and version history. The format matters less than the fact that everyone on the team gets the same one and you can tell when it changed.

Does a skill need an MCP server?

No. Plenty of useful skills are pure instructions. A skill needs a server only when the work involves reaching something outside the agent's context — a warehouse, a ticket system, a deploy.

Can one skill reference a server the reader is not entitled to?

It can be published that way, and the catalog will tell you. The reader gets the skill and not the server, which usually means the skill fails in a confusing way, so we surface the mismatch at publish time.

Which one should we govern first?

Servers, without much doubt. A bad skill produces bad output. A misassigned server hands someone write access to a system they should not be able to reach.

The price is on the page. That is the whole idea.

$99 a month for up to 50 people, cancelled from the billing page. If you've got a question first, ask it — a person answers.

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