Source note
Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skills
Summary
This paper studies 11,497 software-engineering agent skills collected from four public marketplaces and repositories. It shows that reusable skills mainly cover coding, testing, and code review, while requirements, release, and deployment activities remain underrepresented.
Problem
- Agent skill markets are growing, but there is no systematic account of which software-engineering activities they package for reuse.
- This gap makes it difficult to assess lifecycle coverage, compare skills across marketplaces, recommend skills, or judge whether a skill can transfer across projects.
- The problem matters because skills package instructions, workflows, tools, documentation, and executable assets that agents may reuse during software production.
Approach
- The authors crawl ClawHub, SkillHub, SkillNet, and SkillsMP, collecting 775,790 entries before deduplication and filtering.
- They deduplicate by marketplace identifiers and repository URLs, apply rule-based and GPT-5.5 relevance filters, remove unavailable repositories, and produce a final dataset of 11,497 SE-related skills.
- They analyze skill length, structure, source marketplace, update history, versioning, evaluation practices, and lifecycle coverage.
- They map each skill to one of eight lifecycle stages using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Requirement, Plan & Design, Implementation, Code Review, Testing, Release, Deployment, and Maintenance & Operations.
- They classify skill assets into instructions, documentation, scripts, agent workflows, libraries, and applications to measure how much engineering functionality is packaged beyond natural-language guidance.
Results
- Implementation contains 2,875 skills (25.0%), Testing contains 2,446 (21.3%), and Code Review contains 2,198 (19.1%); together they account for 65.4% of the dataset.
- Requirement has 255 skills (2.2%), Release has 363 (3.2%), and Deployment has 609 (5.3%), showing weak coverage of several lifecycle stages.
- SkillsMP contributes 5,322 skills (46.3%), while only 722 skills (6.3%) overlap across marketplaces.
- The average SKILL.md length is 2,078 tokens; 90% contain no more than 4,150 tokens and the longest contains 37,499 tokens.
- Instruction-only skills account for 63.8% of the dataset. Only 13.6% contain code-level executable assets, including scripts (10.5%), libraries (2.0%), and applications (1.1%).
- The paper reports no task-performance benchmark or accuracy comparison against a baseline. Its main evidence is the scale and analysis of the collected corpus, including 2,042 skill updates in January 2026 and structural coverage rates such as Frontmatter at 97.8%, Commands at 79.3%, and Verification at 73.7%.