skills

Definition

Individually separable competencies a model or agent has. In agent engineering the word has taken on a concrete operational sense: a skill is a packaged set of instructions or procedures, kept outside the model and loaded when the task calls for it, so behavior can be added or revised without retraining. Compared with capabilities, which names the overall envelope, skills implies modular units you can compose and swap.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: Repo-To-Skill — Distilling GitHub Repositories Into Skills an AI Can UseRepo-To-Skill: Distilling GitHub Repositories Into AI4AI Skills
• Paper Explainer: Why Agent Skills Work — and Where They BreakDemystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't