Claude Agent Skills - glorified AGENTS.md? or MCP killer?

**Anthropic** achieves a rare feat with back-to-back AI news headlines featuring **Claude's** new **Skills**—a novel way to build specialized agents using Markdown files, scripts, and metadata to handle tasks like creating and reading PDFs, Docs, and PPTs. Simon Willison calls this a "bigger deal than MCP," predicting a "Cambrian explosion in Skills." Meanwhile, **Anthropic** launches **Claude 4.5 Haiku** with strong reasoning and long-context capabilities, priced competitively. Other updates include **OpenAI's** ChatGPT memory management improvements, **Windows 11 Copilot** voice and vision features, and **HuggingChat Omni** routing across 115 open-source models from 15 providers. These developments highlight advances in agent skills, document processing, long-context reasoning, and multi-model routing.