Agent Skills Actually Hurt Performance? WebDev Benchmark Study Reveals
dair_ai · x · 2026-08-26
This paper tests 31 WebDev skills via WebDev-Skills-Bench across 50 projects. Surprisingly, injecting skills reduces Pass@2 by 1.3%-4.2% and raises token costs by 72%-394%. It identifies two failure modes: length distraction (long irrelevant prompts cause loss) and content misleading (skill content itself degrades scores). Findings also show weak skill transfer across models and concentrated losses on easy tasks.
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