arXiv 2603.14805: Knowledge Activation — AI Skills as the Institutional Knowledge Primitive for Agentic Software Development

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This arXiv paper argues the primary bottleneck in scaling agentic software development is not model capability but knowledge architecture — specifically that "skills" (composable, action-oriented, governance-aware units encoding institutional knowledge) are the right primitive for agents to consume rather than raw documentation or in-context retrieval. The framework, called Knowledge Activation, positions skills as the mechanism for converting tacit engineering expertise into executable agent behavior that persists across agents and teams. Directly relevant to the SKILL.md and AGENTS.md standardization trend seen across major platforms this year.