Skills Platform + MCP Catalog

As NerdWallet adopted Claude and internal AI tooling across engineering, teams began creating disparate, duplicate prompts and ad-hoc agent scripts. The Skills Platform and MCP Catalog established a unified, governed standard for how agents interact with company tools and internal domain knowledge.

The Architecture

The platform provides a decentralized yet strictly governed repository structure:

1. Repository Layout: Standardized under teams/<team-name>/<skill-name>, ensuring clear team accountability and ownership.
2. Strict CODEOWNERS Enforcement: Each team exercises autonomous pull request approval over their specialized skills without gating on central platform approval for domain logic.
3. Embedding-Similarity CI: A GitHub Actions CI step vectorizes incoming skill descriptions and compares cosine similarity against all existing registered skills, flagging potential functional duplicates before merge.
4. MCP Decision Framework: An engineering decision tree and connector catalog guiding engineers on whether a task warrants an agent skill, a prompt template, a local tool, or an enterprise MCP server.

Why It Matters

Platform engineering is about creating high-leverage self-service patterns rather than becoming a bottleneck. By combining automated similarity checks with decentralized team ownership, over 500 engineers can safely extend Claude with company-specific capabilities while maintaining security and architectural consistency.