One Skill Too Many: How Co-Installed Skills Conflict in Coding Agents

Key points

• Because skills come from independent sources (teams, developers, plugins, copied collections), an installed skill can be co-installed with a similar skill doing the same job, and the model picks between them by name and description alone.1
• In a conflict, the installed skill loses core functions (e.g., a ban on touching git) because the similar skill runs instead or changes what it does.1
• We present the first empirical study of such conflicts.1
• (1) Conflict-prone skills are common: nearly one in four installed skills is co-installed with one that does the same job, and 37% of judged skills sit inside copied collections.1

Sources (1)

• [1]One Skill Too Many: How Co-Installed Skills Conflict in Coding Agents
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 8, 10:20 AM

  Coding agents are extended with agent skills, directories whose SKILL.md tells the model when and how to perform a task.

  Because skills come from independent sources (teams, developers, plugins, copied collections), an installed skill can be co-installed with a similar skill doing the same job, and the model picks between them by name and description alone.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.