Skillware: 138K Agent Skill Records Analyzed, Proposing Skills as First-Class Software Objects
Agent Skills — natural-language task specs bundled with metadata, scripts, hooks, package manifests, tests, and companion interfaces — have become persistent behavioral artifacts across independent agent systems, but are managed like config files rather than software. This paper analyzes a frozen corpus of 138,133 content-deduplicated records across 20,556 repository identifiers to define a Skillware ontology gated on three conditions: behavioral primacy, independent software identity, and an Agent Host execution relationship. It separates 'Skill Artifact' from 'Skillware Unit' and treats Lifecycle Continuity — whether unit identity survives update, maintenance, rollback, and removal — as a distinct software-grade property.
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