From Registry to Repository: How AI Agent Skills Are Written, Adapted, and Maintained
Published in arXiv preprint, 2026
Recommended citation: Haoyu Gao, Jai Lal Lulla, Hong Yi Lin, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, and Mansooreh Zahedi. 2026. From Registry to Repository: How AI Agent Skills Are Written, Adapted, and Maintained. arXiv:2607.00911. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00911
The first empirical study of AI agent skills as engineered artefacts, mining 18,463 skills from skills.sh and 23,199 personal-use skills from 5,876 GitHub repositories to characterise how skills are authored, reused, customised, and maintained.