Research paper catalogs software engineering activities being packaged as reusable AI agent skills

The paper, titled 'Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skills,' examines the trend of packaging software engineering expertise into reusable skills for AI agents. It notes that software engineering has evolved through increasingly powerful forms of reuse—from source code and libraries to components and services—and that agent skills represent a new reusable artifact. The authors observe that emerging skill repositories and marketplaces allow developers to package, share, and reuse SE expertise, but existing studies lack a focus on which specific SE activities are being encapsulated. This work aims to fill that gap by cataloging the activities being turned into skills.