One Skill Takes Over: Clashing Agent Skills and a One-File Fix
Agent Skills are instruction files that tell a coding agent how to do one job. Users install skills from many authors, so two skills for the same job can be active at the same time. We ask what a model does when both skill files are in its context: does it combine their compatible rules, or follow one skill and drop the other? We build SkillClash, 16 pairs of same-job skills in which code checks every rule and a reference output shows the best result that can be reached. On seven models from five families, from 4B open models to Qwen3-235B and GPT-4.1, a skill's rules are followed 93 to 99% of the time when it is loaded alone and 61 to 62% when a same-job skill is loaded next to it. Most ...
| Authors | Parsa Razmara, Seyedarmin Azizi, Ardalan Aryashad |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 18 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 October 2026 |
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