Who Maintains Agent Skills? A Longitudinal Study of Human-Governed, AI-Assisted Skill Maintenance
Lifelong LLM agents increasingly rely on external skill artifacts as one element for preserving and reusing capabilities over time. These skills (usually portable Markdown files such as SKILL.md) describe when and how to apply a capability and must be corrected, expanded, and consolidated as tools and usage patterns shift over deployment. Recent work seeks to automate skill curation, but it largely evaluates against automated baselines and treats human maintenance as an unmeasured bottleneck. We study that missing process directly. We mine the full commit histories of five public AI-skill repositories, a purposive sample of AI-tooling organizations, covering 873 commits, 143 skill files, ...
| Authors | Chen Shen, Estevam Hruschka |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 September 2026 |
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