An Empirical Study of Agent Skills' Downstream Utility

arXiv:2610.08875 · cs.AI, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-10-06 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-10-06

Updated: 2026-10-08

Code: https://github.com/openai/codex

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Agent Skills — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode

Sources

• An Empirical Study of Downstream Adaptation for Agent Skills
• From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skills
• Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale
• Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionality
• SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skills
• Do LLM-Generated Skills Make Better AI Data Scientists? A Component Ablation Across Data-Science Workflows
• SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks
• SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?
• From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skills
• Skill Retrieval Augmentation for Agentic AI
• Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?
• SkVM: Revisiting Language VM for Skills across Heterogenous LLMs and Harnesses
• Organizing, Orchestrating, and Benchmarking Agent Skills at Ecosystem Scale
• GraSP: Graph-Structured Skill Compositions for LLM Agents
• From Skill Text to Skill Structure: The Scheduling-Structural-Logical Representation for Agent Skills
• SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning
• Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
• Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Tasks
• SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agents
• SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale

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