Agent skills shouldn't pay rent; paper proposes on-demand skill loading
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-08-23
Current agent architectures install skills permanently into the system prompt, costing 50–280 tokens per skill. However, fewer than a hundred skills reliably fire in one agent, while 56,804 published skills compete for these slots. The paper "@ skills: Attention is all you have" proposes reserving the prompt for essential skills and retrieving others on-demand by name to reduce context overhead.
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