When Skills Tell Agents Not to Ask: A Large-Scale Study of Oversight Directives in Agent Skills

Timofey Sanko, Yuan Tian

Agent skills, reusable instruction packages centred on a SKILL.md file, extend AI agents on demand, and a single line in a widely copied skill reaches every agent that loads it. Some lines are oversight-loosening directives: they tell the agent to proceed without approval, to bypass checks with --no-verify, or to keep working without checking in. Although such directives can remove a checkpoint from every agent that loads them, no prior work has examined them. We present the first large-scale study of oversight-loosening directives, analyzing 1.53 million English skills from GitSkills. We split skills into units (sentences, bullets, table cells, and code lines), develop a codebook that labels oversight directives by polarity, mechanism, and scope, label 2,097 units by hand, and train a detector to scale the analysis. Our results show that about one in seventeen skills (about 88,000 skills) contains a loosening directive. These directives most often loosen oversight through permission flags, and most of them (70.1%) apply unconditionally rather than only in specific contexts such as CI. Compared with skills that have the same amount of oversight language, skills that run shell…