From MCP to Agent Skills: Teaching Your AI Agents to Actually Do Analytics

MotherDuck has open-sourced Agent Skills, a catalog of 17 SKILL.md-based instructions that teach AI coding agents how to work correctly with MotherDuck and DuckDB. Unlike MCP (which gives agents tools/hands), skills provide a playbook: the right SQL dialect, connection paths, tenant isolation patterns, and workflow guidance. The format originated with Anthropic's Claude Code, was adopted by OpenAI Codex, and is now supported by 30+ agent products including Cursor, Gemini CLI, and GitHub Copilot. Skills lazy-load into context only when relevant, keeping token usage lean. The catalog covers three layers — utility tasks, multi-step workflows, and end-to-end use cases like building dashboards or data pipelines — and is installable in one CLI command via npx skills.