Agent Skills vs MCP: What’s the difference?

Hosted by Shaw Talebi

Fri, Jan 2, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

59 students

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AI Builders Bootcamp
Shaw Talebi
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What you'll learn

Agent Skills and MCP (simply explained)

Understand what Agent Skills and MCP do, how they work, and how they fit into AI development.

When to use Skills vs MCP

Learn a simple decision framework for choosing Skills or MCP based on your use case, complexity, and tooling needs.

Reusable Skill and MCP templates

Walk away with concrete example templates you can adapt for your own agents and projects.

Why this topic matters

As AI systems get more capable, the main bottleneck isn’t model quality. It’s how you connect models to tools and context. While Skills and MCP give us two ways to do this, each has its strengths and weaknesses. In this lesson, you’ll learn how they work, when to use each, and how to apply them to real agent-building workflows without unnecessary complexity.

You'll learn from

Shaw Talebi

Ex-Toyota Data Scientist with 8+ years in AI. Teaching over 100k learners.

Shaw Talebi is an AI educator and builder who helps technical founders ship real AI apps. A former Data Scientist at Toyota Financial Services with a PhD in Physics from the University of Texas at Dallas, he’s advised 100+ SMBs on practical AI and analytics solutions.

As a solo founder, Shaw has launched multiple AI SaaS products, including y2b, a tool that turns YouTube videos into blog posts, and Ghst, an AI ghostwriter for LinkedIn. As an educator, he’s helped hundreds of technical entrepreneurs join the top 1% of AI builders making a real-world impact through his AI Builders Bootcamp.

Driven by a passion for learning and a mission to make AI accessible to all, he founded a YouTube channel and technical blog that now inspire over 100,000 builders.

Taught builders from...

Google
Meta
Microsoft
Amazon Web Services
Salesforce

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