EverMind(@evermind):Yet another paper. This time, we asked a practical question: Do public SKILL.md files actually make agents better? The open skill ecosystem has a quality problem. The hard part isn’t finding more skills. It’s knowing which ones are unique, useful, safe, permissively licensed, and relevant to the task. We crawled ~821K public skills and curated them into 96,401. Then we tested the full retrieval pipeline across 3 benchmarks, 2 harnesses, and 2 open backbones. It improved all three benchmarks, with the largest pooled gain at +7.5pp on SkillsBench. More skills are not automatically better. Curation, retrieval, and the harness determine whether skills become capability.

2026.08.03 05:38

Yet another paper. This time, we asked a practical question: Do public SKILL.md files actually make agents better? The open skill ecosystem has a quality problem. The hard part isn’t finding more skills. It’s knowing which ones are unique, useful, safe, permissively licensed, and relevant to the task. We crawled ~821K public skills and curated them into 96,401. Then we tested the full retrieval pipeline across 3 benchmarks, 2 harnesses, and 2 open backbones. It improved all three benchmarks, with the largest pooled gain at +7.5pp on SkillsBench. More skills are not automatically better. Curation, retrieval, and the harness determine whether skills become capability.