AI agents can't teach themselves new tricks – only people can
Self-generated skills don’t do much for AI agents, study finds, but human-curated skills do
Teach an AI agent how to fish for information and it can feed itself with data. Tell an AI agent to figure things out on its own and it may make things worse.
AI agents are machine learning models (e.g. Claude Opus 4.6) that have access to other software through a CLI harness (e.g. Claude Code) and operate in an iterative loop. These agents can be instructed to handle various tasks, some of which may not be covered in their training data.
When lacking the appropriate training, software agents can be given access to new “skills,” which are essentially added reference material to impart domain-specific capabilities. “Skills” in this context refer to instructions, metadata, and other resources like scripts and templates that agents load to obtain procedural knowledge.
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