SkillOpt-Lite: Better and Faster Agent Self-evolution via One Line of Vibe
For developers of autonomous agents, this work provides a simpler, faster method to evolve agent skills with theoretical grounding, though it is an incremental improvement over existing skill optimization pipelines.
SkillOpt-Lite introduces a minimal viable pipeline for agent self-evolution using zeroth-order optimization, achieving +8.8 points on GPT-5.5 and +25.4 points on GPT-5.4-nano on LiveMath, and enabling GPT-5.4-nano to surpass GPT-5.5 on SpreadsheetBench (0.7758 vs 0.7620).
While skill optimization for autonomous agents has gained traction, existing methods rely on complex pipelines. This leaves a fundamental question unaddressed: What constitutes a minimal viable pipeline for skill optimization, where every component is justified by theory or empirical necessity? We formalize skill optimization via Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization, mapping classical counterparts (central difference, trust regions) to recent literature. Noting that unlike blind numerical perturbations in classical ZO, skill trajectories serve as interpretable debugging feedback. Grounded in Claude Code philosophy and PAC learning, we establish three principles for convergence and generalization: file-system-based trajectory exploration, consensus attribute mining, and independent validation gating. Eliminating redundancies, we propose SkillOpt-Lite. It accelerates convergence and outperforms full SkillOpt: improving LiveMath by +8.8 points on GPT-5.5 and +25.4 points on GPT-5.4-nano, allowing the nano model to surpass standard GPT-5.4 optimized by SkillOpt. Finally, we integrate our framework into production coding agents like VSCode Copilot, enabling developers to evolve agent skills via one line of vibe. Because our framework treats all agent components simply as standard editable code, this minimal pipeline naturally generalizes to full harness optimization (HarnessOpt). On SpreadsheetBench, HarnessOpt enables GPT-5.4-nano to achieve 0.7758 accuracy, outperforming the larger GPT-5.5 running standard pipelines (0.7620). Code is available at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/SkillOpt-Lite.