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Agents

The Skill Trigger Bottleneck

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First page
The Skill Trigger Bottleneck
The curator’s take

There are 56,804 public agent skills today, all competing for fewer than 100 reliable trigger slots in the system prompt. Your own playbooks compete for that same space, which means the long tail never gets used no matter how good it is. The paper argues the scarcity is an artifact of how skills get installed, not a real limit.

Key points
01

One word for three separate things: Installation currently bundles content, persistence, and automatic triggering. Only triggering needs to occupy prompt space, so the protocol separates the three and prices each tier by what it actually costs.

02

A path is the whole interface: A path addresses any skill, subtree, or collection, and reading it is enough to use it. A directory becomes a menu, so bundles stop being all-or-nothing and you can pull one file out of someone else's collection.

03

Vendoring gives you ownership: Copying a skill into your Git tree at the same path means your team owns and adapts it, with zero token cost until it is named.

04

Why it matters: No manifest, no lockfile, no registration, and SKILL.md is unchanged, so this is adoptable without an ecosystem migration. The three-tier framing is the useful part even if you never adopt the protocol: decide per skill whether it needs to fire unasked, and most of yours do not.

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