MCP, Skills, and Workflows: Three Ways to Put Claude to Work
If you've started building anything with Claude, you've run into three words that get used almost interchangeably and mean completely different things: MCP, Skills, and Workflows. They sit at different layers of the stack, and once I stopped lumping them together, a lot of confusing decisions got simple.
The analogy that made it click for me: imagine Claude as a brilliant but newly hired employee sitting at a desk. Smart, capable, eager — and, on day one, able to do almost nothing useful, because it has no access, no tools, and no process. MCP, Skills, and Workflows are the three things you give that employee, in that order.
Here's how each one changes what the employee can do for you.
The 30-second version
| MCP | Skills | Workflows | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Analogy | An ID badge & keys | A labelled toolbox | A factory assembly line |
| What it gives | Access to your files, apps, and data | Specific abilities, explained in plain English | A fixed, step-by-step plan |
| Who decides the next step | You (it just unlocks the door) | Claude, on the fly | The recipe, deterministically |
| Strength | Connection — Claude can reach the real world | Flexibility — one toolbox, many jobs | Reliability — same process every run |
| Trade-off | Just access; doesn't do anything alone | Claude might skip a tool or use it out of order | Rigid; you have to author the recipe up front |
| Best for | Connecting Claude to a system (GitHub, a database, Slack) | Open-ended tasks where judgment helps | Repeatable, multi-step jobs you run again and again |
The rest of this post is the longer walk through each — and, at the end, how to decide which one a given problem actually needs.
1. MCP — the access pass
The concept: connection and permission.
By default, Claude is very smart but isolated — it only knows what you type into the chat. MCP (the Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that lets Claude safely reach out and interact with your actual systems — your files, your database, a SaaS app you use. Without MCP, Claude is a genius locked in a box. With MCP, it has an ID badge to walk around the office and open the right filing cabinet.
The key thing to understand: MCP is plumbing, not action. An ID badge doesn't file your taxes; it just gets the employee through the door to where the work is. MCP exposes a set of capabilities (read this repo, query that table, send this email) — but something still has to decide when and how to use them.
A concrete example: connect Claude to a GitHub MCP server and it can now read your issues, open pull requests, and comment on code. The protocol is what makes that connection exist. What it does with the connection is the next two features' job.
2. Skills — the toolbox and instruction manual
The concept: give Claude tools, but leave the decisions to it.
A Skill is a specific ability, described in plain English, that Claude can choose to reach for. Think of handing your new employee a power drill with a manual that says: "This is a drill. Use it when you need to put a screw in a wall." You're not standing over their shoulder — you trust them to recognise the moment.
When you ask Claude to do something, it reads the room and thinks, "Ah — this is a job for that Skill," and pulls it out of the toolbox. The Skill might bundle instructions, scripts, and reference material. On this site, for instance, a /seo-content Skill knows how to audit a draft for content quality and AI-citation readiness — I just ask, and Claude decides to invoke it.
The catch: because Claude is deciding in the moment, it's flexible but not guaranteed. On a complicated task it might forget a tool exists, use it in the wrong order, or get pulled down a tangent. That judgment is exactly what makes Skills powerful for open-ended work — and exactly what makes them unpredictable when you need the same thing done the same way every time.
3. Workflows — the factory assembly line
The concept: take away the guesswork with a strict, step-by-step plan.
Instead of letting the employee figure out how to build the shelf, you put them on an assembly line: "Step 1: measure the wood — don't move on until it's measured. Step 2: hand the measurements to the saw worker. Step 3: a quality-control worker checks the cut. Step 4: write the final report."
A Workflow is a rigid recipe that doesn't rely on Claude guessing what comes next. The Workflow itself acts as the manager. It can spin up multiple independent workers (called agents), hand each a narrowly-scoped task, and force them to run in a precise order — some in parallel, some waiting on the step before.
Why it matters: because the process is fixed in code rather than improvised, a Workflow runs the same way every time. It's worth being precise about what that buys you, because it's easy to oversell. A Workflow makes the orchestration deterministic — which steps run, in what order, fanned out to which agents. It does not make the output identical, because each agent is still a language model doing genuine reasoning. What you get is far more consistent and reliable results, plus something you can hand to someone else: it's just a recipe, so anyone can run the exact same assembly line and get the exact same structure of work.
That's the real unlock — repeatability you can share, not a guarantee of byte-for-byte identical answers.
So which one do you actually need?
These aren't competitors — they stack. A serious setup often uses all three: MCP connects Claude to your systems, Skills give it abilities to reach for, and a Workflow choreographs the whole thing when the job is repeatable. But if you're choosing where to start:
- Reach for MCP when the blocker is access — Claude simply can't see the thing it needs (your codebase, your tickets, your data).
- Reach for a Skill when the task is open-ended and you want Claude's judgment to pick the approach — and you're okay with some run-to-run variation.
- Reach for a Workflow when you'll run the same multi-step job over and over, you need it done in a guaranteed order, or you want to hand the recipe to someone else.
A quick gut check: if you find yourself writing the same long instructions to Claude every week and wincing when it skips a step, that's a Skill that's outgrown its box — promote it to a Workflow.
Frequently asked questions
What is MCP in simple terms?
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open standard that lets an AI model like Claude connect to outside systems — your files, apps, and data — safely. It's the "access" layer: it gives the model the ability to reach a system, but doesn't decide what to do once it's there. Think of it as an ID badge and a set of keys rather than a worker.
What's the difference between a Skill and a Workflow?
A Skill is an ability Claude chooses to use when it judges the moment is right — flexible, but it relies on the model's in-the-moment decisions. A Workflow is a fixed, step-by-step plan that runs in a guaranteed order, often coordinating multiple agents. Skills favour flexibility; Workflows favour reliability and repeatability.
Do Workflows guarantee the exact same output every time?
No — and this is a common misconception. A Workflow makes the process deterministic: the same steps run in the same order with the same structure. But each step is still powered by a language model doing real reasoning, so the content of the output can vary between runs. What you gain is consistency and a shareable recipe, not identical answers.
Do I have to choose just one?
No. They operate at different layers and work best together: MCP provides access, Skills provide abilities, and a Workflow orchestrates them into a repeatable process. Start with whichever solves your immediate blocker — access, judgment, or repeatability.
The one-line summary
- MCP lets Claude open your files.
- Skills give Claude a toolbox — but Claude decides when to reach in.
- Workflows put Claude on an organised assembly line, trading flexibility for a reliable, shareable process.
Get the layer right and the rest of the decision tends to make itself.
I'm building things with all three on this very site — if you're figuring out where the line between a Skill and a Workflow sits for your own use case, I'd genuinely like to hear what you land on.