SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systems

Recent self-evolving agents have shown that skills can be discovered, refined, and accumulated through execution. However, existing skill evolution frameworks typically assume a fixed tool layer and evaluate each skill independently, limiting their ability to repair tool-level failures or reason about interactions among skills. We propose SkillSmith, a synergy-aware skill–tool co-evolution framework. SkillSmith introduces a unified proposal space where reflection produces atomic bundles that jointly modify skills and tools—allowing tools to be wrapped, edited, composed, split, or retired when skill evolution identifies a reusable capability gap. To guide this joint search, SkillSmith maintains an ecological utility model inspired by Lotka–Volterra dynamics, where an interaction matrix estimated from execution traces captures pairwise complementarity and conflict among skills and provides pressure signals for retrieval, mutation prioritization, and retirement. Furthermore, SkillSmith records anti-patterns—failure signatures, attributions, and remedies—to accelerate diagnosis and veto proposals that repeat known mistakes. Experiments on three benchmarks (e.g., WildClawBench) and five Qwen3.5 scales show that SkillSmith consistently outperforms strong baselines, with gains that amplify as task complexity and multi-skill co-activation increase.