An Empirical Study of Agent Skills' Downstream Utility

arXiv cs.AIOctober 8, 2026en

arXiv:2610.08875v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills package procedural guidance and resources for reuse, but a relevant Skill does not necessarily improve task performance. Existing studies characterize Skill content and evaluate downstream performance, yet provide limited explanations of how utility depends on content, execution configuration, and multi-Skill organization. We conduct an empirical study on 87 SkillsBench tasks, defining downstream utility as the pass-rate difference from No-Skill on the same tasks under the same model--harness configuration. We compare the same Skills across nine configurations, then examine alternative published Skills and organizations of fixed Sk

This is a short summary published by AI Global Wire. The full article is owned and hosted by arXiv cs.AI — open it there to read it in full.

• Forskning
• Agenter