Skillware: A Software Ontology and Engineering Lifecycle for Persistent Behavioral Artifacts
A new preprint introduces Skillware, a software abstraction designed to formalize and manage persistent behavioral artifacts—called Skill Artifacts—in AI agent systems. The paper defines Skillware Units as managed software entities with independent identity and lifecycle, operationalized through three necessary conditions: behavioral primacy, independent software identity, and an Agent Host execution relationship. The work is supported by analysis of a large corpus of SKILL.md records and multiple engineering implementations, establishing a recurring artifact structure and lifecycle engineering considerations.
Why it matters: Skillware offers a formal ontology and lifecycle for agent skills, potentially enabling more robust, maintainable, and evolvable software artifacts in AI agent ecosystems.
Full story at: arXiv Software Engineering ↗