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:2607. 07504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Product data scientists often ask LLM-based agents to help with recurring execution tasks such as cleaning data, writing SQL, choosing statistical tests, and formatting results.
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. 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:2606. 30775v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enterprise AI agents route user queries to specialized skills by matching queries against natural language skill descriptions.
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. 01139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures.
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. 09253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly equipped with skills to perform complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and tool use.
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.
arXiv:2606. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
arXiv:2606. 06416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time skill augmentation provides a lightweight way to improve data-analytic agents by injecting reusable procedural knowledge without updating model parameters.
Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance. A skill can shape the agent's task execution, including planning, tool use, problem-solving, and validation.
arXiv:2603. 22455v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks.