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Yet the same benchmarks show wide variance, with 16 of 84 tasks suffering negative deltas when Skills are introduced. The community has not yet articulated a clean mechanism for \\emph{when} Skills help and when they are merely redundant overhead. We re-analyze a recently published 180-run controlled study of an MCP-grounded autonomous Capture-the-Flag (CTF) agent under four documentation conditions of increasing richness (55, 1{,}478, 1{,}976, and 4{,}147 lines), and show that these conditions correspond almost exactly to a No-Skills, Experiential-Skills, Curated-Skills, and Comprehensive-Skills ablation. In offensive cybersecurity, a domain not deeply covered by existing Skills benchmarks, the marginal benefit of Skills collaps","title":"When Skills Don't Help: A Negative Result on Procedural Knowledge for Tool-Grounded Agents in Offensive Cybersecurity","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20023","vendor":"arxiv_cs_ai"},"summary":"arXiv:2605.20023v1 Announce Type: new \nAbstract: Agent Skills, structured packages of procedural knowledge loaded into an LLM agent at inference time, are widely reported to improve task pass rates by an average of 16.2~percentage points across diverse domains. Yet the same benchmarks show wide variance, with 16 of 84 tasks suffering negative deltas when Skills are introduced. The community has not yet articulated a clean mechanism for \\emph{when} Skills help and when they are merely redundant overhead. We re-analyze a recently published 180-run controlled study of an MCP-grounded autonomous Capture-the-Flag (CTF) agent under four documentation conditions of increasing richness (55, 1{,}478, 1{,}976, and 4{,}147 lines), and show that these conditions correspond almost exactly to a No-Skills, Experiential-Skills, Curated-Skills, and Comprehensive-Skills ablation. In offensive cybersecurity, a domain not deeply covered by existing Skills benchmarks, the marginal benefit of Skills collaps","title":"When Skills Don't Help: A Negative Result on Procedural Knowledge for Tool-Grounded Agents in Offensive Cybersecurity","vendor":"arxiv_cs_ai"},"confidence":{"method":"deterministic"},"decision":"POSITIVE","issued_at":"2026-05-20T04:43:44Z","notes":"Spider vendor_press (news) news.vendor_press.v1","object":{"captured_by":"crovia.spider.vendor_press","primary_source_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20023"},"predecessors":[],"schema":"crovia.axiom.v1","signature":"ed25519:9cd240e4f164ed189065adb4beb23cfb81abe395fc65a83a9ee86e9bf7eb0a9df2c93d7d4e6f8a6c39fc270171b87cbd2ccb110e21f5e73b2f73bb9d7626660f","signer":"crovia.substrate","subject":{"observed_at":"2026-05-20T04:43:44Z","source_collector":"spider:vendor_press","target_id":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.20023"},"tsa":{"authority":"crovia.substrate.bootstrap","rfc3161_token":"{\"kind\":\"crovia.bootstrap.tsa\",\"source_jsonl\":\"/opt/crovia/spider/data/news/vendor_press_v1.jsonl\",\"source_seal_merkle_root\":\"spider_vendor_press_v1\",\"upgrade_path\":\"Sessione H \\u2014 OpenTimestamps weekly anchor\"}"},"zk_mode":"clear","zk_proof":null},"ledger":{"leaf_hash":"262176e1ff0e8d70aa20cafbad7d4a52320a811c72f6a4ac36bba96cdf36e62c","leaf_index":144957,"ledger_path":"/opt/crovia/substrate/axiom_ledger.jsonl"},"merkle_proof":{"hash_alg":"sha256","leaf_prefix":"0x00","node_prefix":"0x01","odd_leaf_rule":"duplicate_last","path":[{"sibling":"f4ffce9774cdbf7858104d29846750b857d4f24552668ac285ae60a5e056358e","side":"left"},{"sibling":"3d719ee5268c8008818d32dc8b025483b446cd1a3e0407e6f86d64f683a078e9","side":"right"},{"sibling":"1d5624190d696a0ba4315dc2d61c83382f80c86d0fc023e1a277a40737ba62e1","side":"left"},{"sibling":"2464d1e0fe1e64ae24dfe25eac0ede120a69fcc6a7a6c07df9d55ad188d87c23","side":"left"},{"sibling":"bfeaf28695bd8c79f771993181ca36060909a2cbb38e51f59dfe7c16489f5258","side":"left"},{"sibling":"1d9a53b793767d0e949dedec96b7e681027abc3dbbb461606fe118def9d7d4ab","side":"left"},{"sibling":"9dfea8c2063a3b5da665f6432f8c0c081d0ea279aadf5f27f222e6b1ef5cc4eb","side":"right"},{"sibling":"5c26ec91378ced2564bd7218068bacda3ade3a0517e2dc081e9d169a340044ba","side":"right"},{"sibling":"9db04d2181fb869f16a5baf7dcfe999cc93a7e9beef8493d0cc71f57470fe5e1","side":"right"},{"sibling":"1526885f19d1fadf6955cf519dbc4e62d593a4bba99d741e8c301740a7068233","side":"left"},{"sibling":"e3a7d5c07f161682d61bd453ffc02ecdf87cfeda70f986d6650017f9d2d6b265","side":"left"},{"sibling":"edbc49f08e5b92291934c05c9e6efd270a6b0698d8d2fa474006366027dfe098","side":"right"},{"sibling":"3e4df6e7457cecbf36f350375e72dcab336a3984422e4c406ef809e4e2944e96","side":"left"},{"sibling":"8f4c0fbe56b6c010fbb8c782ebcd478079bb3f991d8704e2534209a075d9163c","side":"left"},{"sibling":"be08fedc4e72a6fb56606f66812fae7317e09690b9acb18385f4ab117a981238","side":"right"},{"sibling":"0534329a7475dc9df51998c83c16892126679dade0fa34182f21e869599386c7","side":"right"},{"sibling":"2d24720928ead0e7670650eb55f558c4f20e4c18df376f47ba72cfa8cf0ed344","side":"right"},{"sibling":"d841ad93efda0869e5eb97678f348f03f5caab4353e05ff4bf18f47fb945b822","side":"left"}]},"schema":"crovia.axiom_proof.v1","seal":{"first_collector_run_id":"","first_receipt_hash":"","jsonl_path":"/opt/crovia/substrate/axiom_ledger.jsonl","key_id":"430895f101d38164","last_collector_run_id":"","last_receipt_hash":"","leaf_count":147301,"merkle_root":"08903d7159c3b38eeeeafc09eab15139ea417f1d94f02f1fbc87296b37db840a","public_key_hex":"cf742e26f75669dc673cb5c0786a1ae23ae8ca19c347317192ce40c28a7ff25c","run_id":"hourly_json_retrofit_20260521T183701Z","schema":"crovia.seal.v1","seal_family_version":"crovia-seal-family/1","seal_kind":"substrate_batch","sealed_at":"2026-05-21T18:37:33Z","sig_algorithm":"ed25519","signature":"905f2924632dfa2970c8690285f5b5d4a1d891d0e0ef1cbc404ebec2fd937215ac768e16f0a9f28b18977a55ae0bfd226db6833ae7ef588729054117d2da7303","signer_version":"1.1.0"},"trust_root":{"key_id":"430895f101d38164","public_key_hex":"cf742e26f75669dc673cb5c0786a1ae23ae8ca19c347317192ce40c28a7ff25c","signature_algorithm":"ed25519","url":"/registry/canon/TRUST_ROOT.md"},"verifier":{"spec":"/registry/canon/AXIOM_RECEIPT_v1.md","url":"/v/axm_b2d8eea332dc23e13af9398d0a0598e0fe7c95daabc7b5a12240e4bac1f736f0"}}