mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agents

arXiv 2605.25430 ↗First posted 25 May 2026cs.AIcited by 6

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

Coding agents produce rich trajectories while solving software-engineering tasks. To enable agent self-evolution, these trajectories can be distilled into reusable procedural skills that compactly encode experience to guide future behavior. However, existing skill construction and maintenance methods often rely on fixed prompts and heuristic update rules, leaving it unclear how knowledge should be selected, abstracted, and maintained to best serve downstream agents. We propose CODESKILL, an LLM-based framework that reformulates skill extraction and skill-bank maintenance as a learnable management policy. CODESKILL extracts multi-granularity procedural skills from coding-agent trajectories, evolves skills with new experience, and maintains a compact skill bank for future task solving. We train CODESKILL with reinforcement learning, using a hybrid reward that combines dense rubric-based skill-quality feedback with sparse verifiable execution feedback from the frozen downstream agent. Experiments on EnvBench, SWE-Bench Verified, and Terminal-Bench 2 show that CODESKILL improves average pass rate by 11.03 over the no-skill baseline and by 5.10 over the strongest prompt-based or memory baseline, while maintaining a compact skill bank.

Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 34 of its 50 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 May 2026.

Builds on

34 of 50 references.

Closest ancestors · 9

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolver9 Apr
  2. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
  3. 2026Dynamic Dual-Granularity Skill Bank for Agentic RL30 Mar
  4. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills26 Mar
  5. 2026ARISE: Agent Reasoning with Intrinsic Skill Evolution in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning17 Mar
  6. 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
  7. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
  8. 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionality8 Feb
  9. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Library18 Dec

Other references · 25

  1. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  3. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,393
  4. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  5. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  6. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  7. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  8. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  9. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
  10. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
  11. 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memorycited by 722
  12. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
13 more
  1. 2024Agent Workflow Memorycited by 342
  2. 2025SWE-smith: Scaling Data for Software Engineering Agentscited by 255
  3. 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 253
  4. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
  5. 2025EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecyclecited by 129
  6. 2026MemRL: Self-Evolving Agents via Runtime Reinforcement Learning on Episodic Memorycited by 113
  7. 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 105
  8. 2026SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?cited by 72
  9. 2025SWE-Exp: Experience-Driven Software Issue Resolutioncited by 64
  10. 2025EnvBench: A Benchmark for Automated Environment Setupcited by 36
  11. 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 19
  12. 2026Structurally Aligned Subtask-Level Memory for Software Engineering Agentscited by 11
  13. 2026SWE Context Bench: A Benchmark for Context Learning in Codingcited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026CodeSkill: Latent Skill Abstraction for Long-Horizon Code Agents
  2. 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution
  3. 2026Socratic-SWE: Self-Evolving Coding Agents via Trace-Derived Agent Skills
  4. 2026Rep2Skill: Representation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
  5. 2026SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent
  6. 2026SkillMOO: Multi-Objective Optimization of Agent Skills for Software Engineering
  7. 2026Learning Globally Reusable Skills for Coding Agents
  8. 2026Grounded Skill Synthesis from Code at Scale for Agentic Intelligence