Agent, skill, or MCP? Which to use and when to use them | AWS’ Clare Liguori
Dev Interrupted

Agent, skill, or MCP? Which to use and when to use them | AWS’ Clare Liguori

B2Upper-intermediateAugust 18, 202644 min
  • Interview
  • Technology

Every engineering team wants to build its own custom AI agent, but what if all your organization needs is a standardized skill or a stateless MCP server? This week on Dev Interrupted, Andrew sits down with AWS Senior Principal Engineer Clare Liguori to untangle the ecosystem of modern agentic architecture. They work through how a team decides which AI building blocks to own, and how to get that reach without inheriting a maintenance burden. Clare shares her perspective on the simplified MCP 7.28 spec and why stripping away heavy custom scaffolding is how enterprise AI scales. That same...

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Legore, a senior principal engineer at AWS. She also leads the open source strands SDK

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Welcome back to Dev Interrupted, brought to you by Linear-V. My guest today is Claire Legore, a senior principal engineer at AWS. She also leads the open source strands SDK and is a core maintainer for MCP. And this one's a treat for me because we've been following MCP's journey from the very beginning, from its huge initial hype cycle to its death, to its return,

0:25

to it's now easy to adopt stateless form in the recent 728 spec. And Claire is one of the people driving that roadmap behind the scenes

0:33

and also building an agent framework born from cross-team needs at AWS. And Claire and I dig into not only the next version of MCP but what you should be doing now

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