@skills: Attention is all you have
There are 56,804 public agent skills today, and teams write many more privately. The dominant delivery model is installation: once installed, a skill's description remains in the system prompt, competing for fewer than 100 reliable trigger slots. This leaves the long tail with no practical path to use and forces teams' own playbooks to compete for the same scarce space. We observe that installation bundles three separable functions: content, persistence, and automatic triggering. Only the last requires prompt residency. We therefore propose @skills, an open protocol that separates them. A path addresses any skill, subtree, or collection, and reading a skill is sufficient to use it, so not...
| Authors | Li Yin, Zhi Li, Zhan Shi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 12 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 August 2026 |
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