Agent Skill Framework: Perspectives on the Potential of Small to Medium Language Models in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Skills are getting increasingly used in recent agentic frameworks, performing robustly with proprietary LLMs. Yet, their effectiveness for small and medium-sized open-source models (270M--80B) remains underexplored, especially under industrial, resource-constrained conditions. As such, we present a large-scale empirical study evaluating the skill paradigm's feasibility across two open-source classification tasks: one insurance-claim task based on proprietary data, and a set of Python programming problems. We find that very small models frequently fail to retrieve or select correct skills, substantially limiting their usefulness in the evaluated skill-augmented settings, while larger 30B--80B models gain substantial benefits from skill augmentation. Furthermore, we provide a deployment-oriented GPU profile, reporting VRAM time occupancy (GB$\cdot$min) across models under our evaluation settings---a deployment-oriented metric that may help characterize GPU-memory costs, where small and medium models are typically preferred for VRAM control. These results characterize how the benefits of skill augmentation vary with model scale, task complexity, and GPU budget, and provide deployment-oriented observations.