Colin, a context engine for keeping agent skills fresh
Hi HN — I'm the creator of FastMCP and wanted to share a new project we've open-sourced called Colin. I obviously love MCP, but I also use skills extremely heavily in my day-to-day work. Being exposed to both has made me very aware of a tension: - Anything with dynamic information, I ship over MCP. This takes work to set up and requires conversational boilerplate to refresh in every conversation. - Anything behavioral, I put in skills. They're lightweight, used automatically, and feel great. But I would never put dynamic information in a skill because keeping it up to date is a pain. And yet…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN — I'm the creator of FastMCP and wanted to share a new project we've open-sourced called Colin. I obviously love MCP, but I also use skills extremely heavily in my day-to-day work. Being exposed to both has made me very aware of a tension: - Anything with dynamic information, I ship over MCP. This takes work to set up and requires conversational boilerplate to refresh in every conversation. - Anything behavioral, I put in skills. They're lightweight, used automatically, and feel great. But I would never put dynamic information in a skill because keeping it up to date is a pain. And yet the idea of having an agent skill that includes relevant and timely data is so appealing! So: think of Colin as a skills-native templating engine. The goal is to compile context documents from dynamic sources (GitHub, Linear, Notion, MCP servers, etc.) in a way that makes them easy to automatically update. Colin traces dependencies to determine staleness and has intelligent caching to minimize the burden of recompiling. It's general purpose, but it turns out to be extremely useful for writing skills that contain dynamic knowledge and need to stay current. We've just released it. It's experimental and early, but it's a direction I'm actively exploring and would love feedback. Here's a post with more background, if interested: https://www.jlowin.dev/blog/colin
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I've been deeply involved in working with AI agents and large language models (LLMs) for a while now. During a recent job search, I found myself repeatedly explaining my skills and experiences to various assistants. Around the same time, I was creating content for my website to help hiring teams understand my capabilities better and make informed decisions. MCP had started to gain momentum and I saw a way to reduce my toil. So I built an MCP server that can effectively communicate my qualifications as a job candidate. This server acts as an AI-powered resume, providing an understanding of my…
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