Representation Affects Retrieval: A Case Study of Skill Discovery and Routing in a Multimodal Agent Harness

A production agent harness must discover and rank, from a growing library of skills, the one most appropriate for a user's task. At small scale this selection happens in context: the LLM planner chooses among skill representations exposed in its system prompt, without an explicit embedding-based retrieval step. We treat this in-context selection as the small-N counterpart to embedding-based skill retrieval at scale, and present a case study of how Tinycloud, a production multimodal video agent harness, represents its skills for the planner. The harness ships skills under two recurring representations: tool-skills that wrap a single external API or system tool and serve as primitive vocabu...

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