Experimental Ext Skills

Skills Over MCP Working Group

⚠️ **Experimental** — This repository is an incubation space for the Skills Over MCP Working Group. Contents are exploratory and do not represent official MCP specifications or recommendations.

**Charter:** [modelcontextprotocol.io/community/skills-over-mcp/charter](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/community/skills-over-mcp/charter) — mission, scope, membership, active work items, and success criteria. **Project board:** [Skills Over MCP WG](https://github.com/orgs/modelcontextprotocol/projects/38/views/1) **Meeting notes:** [Skills Over MCP WG discussions](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/discussions/categories/meeting-notes-skills-over-mcp-wg) **Discord:** [#skills-over-mcp-wg](https://discord.com/channels/1358869848138059966/1464745826629976084) **Open work:** [Pull requests](https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/experimental-ext-skills/pulls) — proposals, decisions, implementations, and other in-flight contributions welcome.

Why Skills Over MCP?

MCP servers give agents tools, but tools alone are insufficient for complex workflows — tool descriptions tell an agent *what* a tool does, not *how to orchestrate* multiple tools to achieve a goal. Skills bridge this gap. They are structured "how-to" knowledge: multi-step workflows, conditional logic, and orchestration instructions that can run to hundreds of lines.

Skills are *context*, and MCP is a *context protocol*. Agents already connect to remote services over MCP to get tools — they can get the know-how to use those tools through the same channel. A remote MCP server can serve both its tools and the instructions for using them together, as a single atomic unit. This also enables automatic discovery (connect to a server, find its skills), dynamic updates (server-side changes flow without reinstall), multi-server composition (skills orchestrating tools across servers), and enterprise distribution (RBAC, multi-tenant, version-adaptive content) —