research(skills): SkillOS — learning skill curation for self-evolving agents, apply to zeph-skills self-learning (arXiv:2605.06614)

[bug-ops]

Description

arXiv:2605.06614 — SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents (May 7, 2026)

Proposes a skill curation operating system: automatically selects which skills to retain, merge, or discard based on utility and usage frequency. Treats skill libraries as first-class managed resources with lifecycle management.

Relevant to Zeph: zeph-skills has self-learning (SKILL.md hot-reload, embedding matcher) but no skill lifecycle management — skills are never pruned or merged.

Potential Applicability

• Add skill utility tracking (usage count, success rate) in zeph-skills registry
• Implement automatic pruning of low-utility skills below configurable threshold
• Skill merging: semantically similar skills below distance threshold get consolidated

Expected Behavior

zeph-skills should expose a skills.curation.prune_threshold and skills.curation.merge_threshold config.

Actual Behavior

Skills accumulate indefinitely with no pruning or merging logic.

Environment

• Crate: zeph-skills
• arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06614

[bug-ops]

Consolidated into #4219 (RFC: skill structure beyond flat registry)