Reading CMU 11-768 L4: Skills and Memory — How Agents Stop Starting Over
Lecture 4 of CMU 11-768 sorts cross-task experience into episodes, facts, and skills, stored as external artifacts rather than in context or weights. Human-written skills load through SKILL.md and progressive disclosure, lifting the average SkillsBench pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5%. Skills an agent induces itself can be tested before admission when written as code, but break easily on a new website. The hard part is the lifecycle: imperfect judges, over-retrieval, and bloated skill libraries each eat into the gains.