| name | skills-stack-explainer |
| description | Decide when to use Skills vs prompts, Projects, MCP, and subagents, and combine them into a coherent workflow. |
Instructions
Mental model
Use these building blocks:
- Skills: teach repeatable procedures or domain expertise (instructions + optional code/assets), loaded dynamically with progressive disclosure.
- Prompts: one-off, conversational instructions inside a chat.
- Projects: persistent workspace + knowledge base for an initiative.
- Subagents: specialized assistants with their own prompts and tool permissions.
- MCP: connectivity to external systems where data lives.
How to choose
- If you repeat the same instruction across conversations, convert it into a Skill.
- If you need persistent background knowledge for a specific initiative, use a Project.
- If the data lives in another system (drive, repo, CRM), use MCP to connect it.
- If you want parallelism or strict tool isolation, use subagents.
- Use prompts to refine the task moment-to-moment.
Combine them
A common pattern:
- Put reference materials into a Project.
- Connect external sources with MCP.
- Add a Skill that defines the analytical framework.
- Delegate discrete work to subagents.
- Iterate via prompts.
Bundled resources
Examples
