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    "story_id": "mp-2026-08-10-010",
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    "headline": "Agent Skills Learned How to Forget Bad Advice",
    "slug": "agent-skills-learned-how-to-forget-bad-advice",
    "dek": "SkillProx replays diagnosis-driven edits, rolls back regressions and audits whether each stored instruction still earns its place.",
    "summary": "SkillProx replays diagnosis-driven edits, rolls back regressions and audits whether each stored instruction still earns its place.",
    "body_text": "The framework treats textual agent skills as modular knowledge rather than model weights. Its forward step tests proposed edits on the same task batch and reverses regressions; its backward step decomposes a skill into auditable units, estimates each unit's contribution and consolidates or removes it behind a validation gate. Across multiple language-model backbones, the authors report a three-percentage-point average accuracy gain over their strongest gradient-based baseline. The evidence is benchmark-bound preprint work.",
    "why_it_matters": "SkillProx replays diagnosis-driven edits, rolls back regressions and audits whether each stored instruction still earns its place.",
    "limitations": [],
    "importance": 8,
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    "first_published_at": "2026-08-10T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-08-10T15:50:00.000-04:00",
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    "tags": [
      "agents",
      "skills",
      "memory",
      "evaluation"
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-08-10-010",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2608.07449",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-08-07T13:00:00.000-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "Agent Skills Learned How to Forget Bad Advice",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-08-10T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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