Agents shouldn't pay rent for skills they rarely use.

Right now, the only way to give an agent a skill is to install it, and installing means its description sits in your system prompt on every message forever.

This paper measures that standing cost at 50 to 280 tokens per skill.

It also argues that fewer than a hundred skills can fire reliably in one agent.

There are 56,804 published skills bidding for those slots.

So the proposed fix is reserve the prompt for the few skills that must fire without you thinking about it, and reach for everything else by name.

– arxiv. org/abs/2608.12610

Title: "@ skills: Attention is all you have"