Recommended paper for agent skill builders.

There are 56,804 public agent skills today, all competing for fewer than 100 reliable trigger slots in the system prompt. Your own playbooks compete for that same space, and the long tail never gets used.

skills separates the three things installation bundles together. Content, persistence, and automatic triggering. Only triggering needs to sit in the prompt.

A path addresses any skill, subtree, or collection, and reading it is enough to use it. A directory becomes a menu, so bundles stop being all-or-nothing. Vendoring copies a skill into your Git tree at the same path, so your team owns and adapts it.

No manifest, no lockfile, no registration, and SKILL.md is unchanged.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12610

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