arXiv AI By Vladimiros Peilivanidis (ARPA Hellenic Logical Systems)

Don't Prompt Your Agents. Equip Them: Skillware as a Modular Standard for Sovereign, Auditable, and Deterministic Capability Execution for Logical Systems

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The paper introduces Skillware, an open architectural framework that separates an agent’s intent from its execution by providing modular, versioned software capability bundles. These bundles include typed JSON contracts, deterministic Python code, task directives, datasets, and unit tests, allowing agents to perform tasks reliably without relying on fragile prompt engineering. Experiments across 23 models and 368 benchmarks show that small local models equipped with Skillware outperform larger frontier models, reducing token usage by up to 84.8%, cutting inference costs by up to 97.3%, and eliminating parameter errors.

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