What does an agent need to do useful work? MCP connects an agent to your tools, data, and services, such as Slack or Linear. A skill gives an agent a playbook for a specific task, such as drafting and sending a Slack message in your writing style.

Skills over MCP lets a service expose both through one connection: the actions an agent can take and the task knowledge behind each one.

Check out the Skills Extension SEP, as well as our mcp-use example on how to implement them.

What is Skills over MCP?

Skills over MCP follows the Agent Skills specification. A Skill is a directory that contains a SKILL.md file at its root. A Skill may also contain additional files and subdirectories that may contain references, scripts, or examples.

Here is an example of what a Skill looks like:

skills/
├── purchasing/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   ├── references/approval-policy.md
│   └── templates/purchase-order.md
└── refunds/
    ├── SKILL.md
    ├── references/policy.md
    └── templates/confirmation.md

---
name: purchasing
description: Create approved purchase orders with the create-purchase-order tool
---
 
# Purchasing
 
Before creating a purchase order, read the
[approval policy](references/approval-policy.md). When the purchase is
approved, call `create-purchase-order` with the SKU and requested quantity.
Use [the order template](templates/purchase-order.md) when confirming the
purchase.

An MCP Server serves Skills via its resources primitive. An MCP resource is just addressable content a server exposes by URI.

The server advertises support for Skills in it's initialization handshake:

{
  "capabilities": {
    "extensions": {
      "io.modelcontextprotocol/skills": {}
    }
  }
}

The agent lists these skills through a skills/list message which returns available Skills from the server:

{
  "skills": [
    {
      "uri": "skill://purchasing/SKILL.md",
      "name": "purchasing",
      "description": "Create approved purchase orders with the create-purchase-order tool",
      "resources": [
        {
          "uri": "skill://purchasing/references/approval-policy.md",
          "digest": "sha256:9f36c8a14b72"
        },
        {
          "uri": "skill://purchasing/templates/purchase-order.md",
          "digest": "sha256:4d7a2e90c615"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "uri": "skill://refunds/SKILL.md",
      "name": "refunds",
      "description": "Check refund eligibility and use the refund-order tool safely",
      "resources": [
        {
          "uri": "skill://refunds/references/policy.md",
          "digest": "sha256:72ab5d3c8e19"
        },
        {
          "uri": "skill://refunds/templates/confirmation.md",
          "digest": "sha256:c14f6b908a3d"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

The Skills catalog returns a list of available skills, each with its related resources, as well as a digest for each file. The digest lets a host verify fetched content matches the catalog.

Here's the flow of how an MCP Client can read the Skills from a server:

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Serve Skills with mcp-use

mcp-use offers first class support for Skills over MCP. It's as easy as dropping in a skills/ folder and mcp-use automatically advertises and serves the Skills.

shopping-mcp/
├── src/index.ts
└── skills/
    └── purchasing/
        ├── SKILL.md
        ├── references/approval-policy.md
        └── templates/purchase-order.md

And that's all you need in order to ship your Skills and MCP together!

Skills over MCP support is now available in mcp-use v2.1.0.

Try it now in the mcp-use Inspector