Show notes
Tool descriptions tell an agent what a tool does. They don't tell it how to use five tools together, in the right order, following your conventions. That gap is where this conversation lives.Filmed at AGNTCon + MCPCon in Tokyo with Ola Hungerford, Principal Engineer for AI Enablement at Nordstrom and a maintainer of the Model Context Protocol, who spent the last several months turning a pattern everyone was quietly reinventing into an actual MCP extension.Ola walks through what skills over MCP really means: the server stops being a pile of tools and becomes a distribution channel, handing the agent the instructions, workflows and knowledge it needs only at the moment it needs them. She explains why server instructions weren't enough, how progressive discovery keeps context from exploding, and why the same mechanism works for memory and preferences even when no tools are involved.Then it gets into the harder parts. What belongs in the MCP spec versus the agent skills spec. Why passing custom front matter through opens a rug pull and prompt injection surface nobody wanted. Where skills start to look like sub-agents, and why there's still no standard way to declare which servers a skill depends on. And the honest problem underneath all of it: how do you standardize something while everyone is still finding out what it's actually for, without breaking a hundred things the next time you change your mind?Timestamps:[

