What if you could pay the reasoning cost once, then reuse what the model learned across future tasks?

New Microsoft paper finds that some expensive test-time reasoning can be replaced with a small set of rules learned from previous agent runs.

The paper tests a cheaper alternative: collect 35-50 past trajectories, have a coding agent extract recurring failure patterns, then turn those patterns into a small markdown skill added to the non-reasoning model's system prompt.

For GPT-5.4-mini, those skills recovered 55%-100%+ of the gap between non-reasoning and reasoning modes across 4 agent benchmarks, while using 2.9-4.5× fewer output tokens than reasoning.

On ALFWorld and τ2-retail, the skilled non-reasoning model actually beat the reasoning mode.

The useful part is that the distiller did not need reasoning traces: skills built only from cheap non-reasoning rollouts were competitive across all 4 domains.

The limit is equally useful: reasoning still won on telecom and SpreadsheetBench, where each task contains more instance-specific dependencies that a fixed skill cannot capture.

So the practical split is: distill repeated procedures once, then reserve expensive test-time reasoning for the tasks that genuinely need fresh search.

• arxiv. org/abs/2608.07885

Title: "Reason Wide, Not Deep: Amortizing the Reasoning Premium into Distilled Skills"