Claude Skills, MCP and AI agents

Claude Skills, MCP and AI agents are the pieces that let an AI assistant follow your own workflow and reach tools outside the chat window. A skill is a packaged set of instructions that Claude loads when a task calls for it. MCP is an open standard that lets a model talk to other apps and data sources. An agent is an AI that breaks a goal into steps and keeps working until the job is done. This topic is for people who already chat with AI and now want it to handle repeatable work, whether they write code or not.

The articles fall into a few groups. Plain explainers cover what an agent is, how a skill differs from a prompt, and what MCP and an MCP server actually do. Step-by-step guides show how to write a SKILL.md file, connect an MCP server to Claude, and check what a computer needs in accounts, software and settings before a skill can run on it. Use-case pieces show a skill doing real work, such as finding and summarizing sources for a research task.

Start with the guide that explains what a Claude Skill is and how to install and use one, since most of the other pages build on that idea. From there, read the MCP explainer to see how an assistant connects to real data, then move on to agents once the first two ideas feel familiar. Every article cites official sources and notes the date they were read. Plans, prices and usage limits change often, so check the date on each page before you rely on any detail.