A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Four Companies Serve Skills Over MCP The Way The Spec Says," Kin Lane, October 21, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/21/four-companies-serve-skills-over-mcp-the-way-the-spec-says/
Priya spent most of her working life on a platform team at a mid-sized logistics software shop, which meant she owned the MCP server nobody else wanted to own. She read Kin Lane's post on a Wednesday morning with her coffee going cold, mostly because a coworker had pasted the link into chat with no comment.
The first thing she noticed was the scale. The post probed 9,170 endpoints across 3,765 providers, and 1,450 endpoints from 1,003 providers answered. Four of them served skills the way the spec says. She had expected the number to be bigger and felt a small, unwelcome relief that her team wasn't the only one behind.
Then she got to the list of companies doing it their own way, and the relief turned into something closer to embarrassment. The post says that seventeen companies serve skills through their own tools, against four through the spec. Her team had built a get_playbook tool eight months ago. It returned a markdown file when you gave it a name. It was, she realized, one more entry in the pile the post describes: a slightly different name and a slightly different shape.
She disagreed with part of it, and she said so to the empty meeting room. The post says that an agent that meets Timescale, Daloopa and AWS has to read three tool descriptions to learn three conventions. That was fair. But her agents never met anyone else's servers. Her tool worked, her customers used it, and nobody had filed a bug in months. Moving to a standard that, by the post's own count, only 44 of 1,450 answering endpoints negotiate at the current revision felt like paying for tidiness. The post also admits the extension is opt-in and versioned on its own, so waiting was not obviously wrong.
Still, one line stayed with her. The post says the companies teaching their own product are the easy conversions, because the content is already a SKILL.md and they would only need to change how it is served. Her playbooks were exactly that. Three folders, each with a SKILL.md she had written herself so that a new agent could learn how to book a freight quote. She had never thought of them as something a client could discover without being told a tool name.
She also noticed what the spec leaves out. It covers serving skills, not buying, scanning, grading or publishing them, and she was glad, because her team had a review step she didn't want a standard to quietly replace.
She did not propose a migration. She had been in enough planning meetings to know how that ends. Instead she opened her server's initialize handler and looked at the capabilities it returned, a short block she hadn't touched since the first version.
Then she created a branch and named it skills-extension-spike. She wrote one line in the description saying she would try declaring the capability and serving a single playbook at a skill:// URI, alongside the old tool, and that nothing would be removed. She closed the laptop to go find fresh coffee, and the branch stayed open behind her.