Signal or Noise? A Benchmark Study of Agent Skills in Web Development

Abstract

Agent Skills are reusable procedural modules that are increasingly injected into coding-agent sessions to encode framework conventions, anti-patterns, and reusable tools. However, because each injected Skill expands the prompt of every query, an effective Skill benchmark must determine not only whether an agent can solve a task, but whether the Skill should have been injected at all. We introduce WebDev-Skills-Bench and use it for a controlled empirical study of 31 public WebDev Skills on 50 Web-Bench projects and 1,000 ordered tasks. The benchmark compares four matched conditions, including a length-matched irrelevant control and leave-one-out component ablations. To isolate Skill effects from prompt-length artifacts, we place only SKILL.md in the prompt while mounting auxiliary files into the agent workspace. Across four models, target Skill injection reduces mean Pass@2 by 1.3% to 4.2%, lowers task completion depth, and increases token cost by 72% to 394%, with gains in only 17% to 36% of Skill-project pairs. Length-matched controls reveal two failure modes: some models are length-distracted, where an equally long irrelevant Skill reproduces most of the loss, while others are content-misled, where prompt length is neutral but Skill content still lowers Pass@2 by 1.1% to 1.4%. Further analysis shows that losses concentrate on easy early tasks, Skill rankings transfer weakly across models, and anti-pattern rules outperform example-heavy content within helpful Skills. These findings recast a matched Skill as a hypothesis about a particular Skill-project-model triple rather than a portable asset, reframing injection as a per-deployment routing decision and making length-matched controls and per-model audits a minimum standard for Agent-Skill evaluation.