One Skill Too Many: How Co-Installed Skills Conflict in Coding Agents
Coding agents are extended with agent skills, directories whose SKILL.md tells the model when and how to perform a task. Because skills come from independent sources (teams, developers, plugins, copied collections), an installed skill can be co-installed with a similar skill doing the same job, and the model picks between them by name and description alone. In a conflict, the installed skill loses core functions (e.g., a ban on touching git) because the similar skill runs instead or changes what it does. The task still passes, so benchmarks that check only task completion miss such cases. We present the first empirical study of such conflicts. From snapshots of 20,947 repositories, we min...
| Authors | Chaoliang Yan, Zihao Xu, Yuekang Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SE |
| Published | 8 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 October 2026 |
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