
arXiv: 2606.20631
Agent skills externalise reusable agent-facing behavioural knowledge and guidance as persistent artefacts that can be discovered, activated, and interpreted by LLM agents. Although a skill artefact is static at rest, its architectural responsibilities arise in use, when the artefact is selected for a run, bound to context and authority constraints, interpreted by a stochastic agent, and recorded as run evidence. We call this run-specific relation skill-in-use. This paper studies agent skill harnessing: the architectural responsibilities that govern the transition from skill artefacts to skill-in-use, bound the executable consequences associated with skill-in-use, and capture evidence for attribution, verification, repair, and evolution. Through a multivocal literature review of 37 systems and 51 papers, we derive a catalogue of ten architectural patterns (five core, five supporting) for skill harnessing and synthesise them into a reference architecture with four responsibility layers: Supply Chain, Mediation, Execution Control, and Evidence & Feedback. We evaluate the architecture through cross-instantiation across 8 selected systems. The resulting patterns and reference architecture provide a vocabulary and diagnostic frame for analysing skill-harnessing responsibilities across agent systems.
Machine Learning, FOS: Computer and information sciences, Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Machine Learning, FOS: Computer and information sciences, Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning (cs.LG)
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