Sanity-check your Claude Code setup with the skills-to-MCP ratio heuristic

alexop.dev·medium signal

A useful 2026 diagnostic: if you have more Skills than MCP servers, you're probably architecting right; if you have more MCP servers than Skills, you're paying a context tax for capabilities you could express more cheaply. Skills encode 'how to do something,' MCP grants 'access to external systems,' and subagents 'delegate to a specialist' — most MCP servers you reach for could be a cheaper skill. Use the ratio as a prompt to convert bloated MCP integrations into lightweight skills.