Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't
arXiv:2608. 14036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge.
arXiv:2606. 15390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone.
arXiv:2608. 14036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge.
Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline.
arXiv:2606. 11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized.
arXiv:2609.27717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-written agent skills encode rich workflows for real-world problem solving, but are typically used as external inference-time instructions rather...
arXiv:2606. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
arXiv:2609.38822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anthropic's Agent Skills package reusable procedural know-how for an LLM agent into SKILL.md directories, and open-source aggregations have grown pas...
arXiv:2605.08693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Skills provide an effective mechanism for improving LLM agents on complex tasks, yet in existing agent frameworks, their creation, refinement, and...
SkillGym is an automatic pipeline that generates verifiable environments for training skill-use agents. It crawls internet skills, filters for reproducible workflows, and uses a builder‑reviewer process to create difficulty‑controlled tasks with reference solutions and verifiers. The system builds 6.8k environments, collects 19k successful trajectories, and fine‑tunes LLMs from 2B to 122B parameters, improving performance and skill invocation rates.
arXiv:2605. 24050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skill libraries allow LLM agents to load task-specific instructions on demand, letting non-expert users solve domain-specific tasks through natural language without knowing which skills exist or how they work.
arXiv:2608. 05810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving agents accumulate capability by distilling reusable skills from their execution trajectories, but we find this process is not monotonic: past a critical pool size, newly added skills degrade performance instead of improving it.
arXiv:2602. 12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time.
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.