Implementing Agent Skills and MCP servers as part of my development workflow has been a huge boost to my productivity. Long gone are the days where I'd actually have to leave my IDE to raise a pull request in GitHub, and then manually add that PR to a Jira ticket that's still impossible to find in 2026.
Now it's just a matter of me asking GitHub Copilot to create the PR using my create-pr Agent Skill, then use the Atlassian MCP Server to link the PR to the appropriate Jira ticket. All of which I can do without ever having to leave my IDE.
However, I use different coding agents for my development. I'll use GitHub Copilot heavily for work, but I'll use Claude Code and Cursor for my side-projects. For those of you who've used both tools in anger will know that configuring Agent Skills, MCP servers, agents and other agentic components differ slightly between the two tools, which was a bit of a pain to deal with every time I wanted to use the same components in different tools.
The Agent Plugins standard was announced on August 6th 2026, which defined a packaging layer that sits on top of both Agent Skills and MCP Servers, giving developers a way of installing agentic coding components in a standardized format across different coding agent clients.
