The paper investigates how co-installed coding‑agent skills can conflict, causing the model to choose a similar skill over the intended one based solely on name and description. An empirical study of 20,947 repositories uncovered 822,109 candidate skill pairs, with 312 confirmed conflicts tested across three models, revealing that nearly one in four installed skills is overridden by a similar skill. Key findings include that conflicts often involve normative skills, that the installed skill loses core functions in about one‑fifth of runs, and that the first skill read determines the outcome, suggesting benchmarks should evaluate exclusive core functions and platforms should guard the initial read.
By Chaoliang Yan, Zihao Xu, Yuekang Li, Shangzhi Xu, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Siqi Ma
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.
By Gen Dong, Yanjie Gao, Liqun Li, Tianyin Xu, Yu Hua, Fan Yang
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.
By Yixuan Wang, Yiyang Zhou, Yiming Liang, Congyu Zhang, Fuxiao Liu, Jiawei Zhou, Huaxiu Yao
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:2608.23067v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent Skills are reusable procedural modules that are increasingly injected into coding-agent sessions to encode framework conventions, anti-patterns,...
By Ziyue Yang, Fan Ding
arXiv:2610.08875v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Agent Skills package procedural guidance and resources for reuse, but a relevant Skill does not necessarily improve task performance. Existing studie...
By Yu Cheng, Dehai Zhao, Zhongxin Liu, Qing Huang, Zhenchang Xing, Xiaoxue Ren
arXiv:2606. 20659v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills encode reusable procedural knowledge for large language model (LLM) agents, and existing benchmarks show that such skills can improve task-level performance.
By Boyin Tan, Xiaowei Huang, Youcheng Sun
The paper introduces ACES (Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills), a framework that evaluates reusable skills and capability packages by running paired live trials with and without a target skill, normalizing results into the Agent Trajectory Interchange Format (ATIF), and grading six runtime metrics to compute Skill Lift. ACES demonstrates that scan-only gates miss important aspects of skill performance, while the evaluation protocol reveals significant improvements in skill execution, behavior check, and skill efficiency across 145 real skills and 947 scored cases. The open‑source NVIDIA SkillEvaluator implementation enables reproducible, repository‑native assessment of agentic skills in production environments.
By Christopher Kevin, Narendran Raghavan, Jean-Francois Puget, Roshni Malani, Meghana Puvvadi, Moshe Abramovitch, Mohit Gupta, Rama Akkiraju, Subodh Prabhu, Yogesh Dangi, Wei Luo, Seong Hee Lee
arXiv:2606. 17819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills -- structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities -- have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill.
By Maksim Shaposhnikov, Nicolas Fortuin, Simon Stipcich, Maria I. Gorinova, Amy Heineike, Rob Willoughby
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It evaluates candidate skills against source evidence and nine safety properties, then tests them in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The system iteratively refines skills based on these results, achieving high precision in vulnerability detection and significantly improving task performance and security rates.
By Zhibo Zhang, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang
arXiv:2610.14918v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Evaluating an agent's ability to strictly satisfy diverse and procedurally complex requirements is essential to determining its practical reliability....
By Zhengxi Li, Junyi Zhou, Qiyuan Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Fuyuan Lyu, Le Tian, Xiao Zhou, Chen Ma, Yufei Wang
arXiv:2607. 07946v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: DeepSWE is a benchmark of 113 original, long-horizon software engineering tasks for evaluating coding agents.
By Wenqi Huang, Charley Lee, Leonard Tng, Serena Ge