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Scientific Agent Skills: A Library of Procedural Knowledge for Research Agents (arxiv.org)
2 points by gmays 30 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A library gives research agents 163 step-by-step procedures for defensible analysis, each an instruction file opened only when needed instead of relying on whatever code the agent writes. Short descriptions of all 163 fill 7.1% of a 200,000-token window; the median procedure fits in 23.9%.

Abstract

A language-model agent asked to analyse an experiment will usually return working code. Whether the analysis is defensible is a different question. A defensible analysis depends on procedural choices: which test the field accepts, which identifier namespace is authoritative, and which caveats must accompany a result. We present Scientific Agent Skills, an open library of 163 such procedures in 16 areas of practice, including genomics, cheminformatics, medical imaging, study design and scientific communication. Each skill is a directory built around a versioned, human-readable instruction file. An agent loads the file only when a task calls for it; the directory often also contains reference material and runnable scripts. We report no task-level evaluation and no host selection rate. We measure two properties of the documentation corpus: the always-resident descriptions of all 163 skills cost 7.1% of a 200,000-token window, and the median documented workflow fits within 23.9% of it, although 29 of 46 would overflow if every reference file were loaded. Openly licensed and available at https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills.

Timothy Kassis, Vinayak Agarwal, Yuhuan He, Darshil Patel, Aubrey M. Brueckner
arXiv:2609.00065 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Aug 30, 2026 · updated Sep 2, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 31 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables, 1 listing. v2: adds a figure of how the documented workflows compose skills, quotes the skill clauses behind the introduction's examples, replaces the appendix listing with a procedural skill, names supported hosts and the pinned install path, and reports the two corpus findings in the abstract

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