Hierarchical Skill Evolution for Coding Agent

Abstract

Skills provide agents with reusable experience to guide future decisions without modifying the underlying model. However, coding trajectories are often entangled with task- and repository-specific contexts, making it challenging to distill procedural skills that generalize across diverse coding environments. To address this challenge, we present Hierarchical Skill Evolution (HSE), which progressively distills procedural knowledge from coding trajectories through hierarchical evidence aggregation. HSE first extracts task-level evidence from individual trajectories, then aggregates recurring evidence within the same repository to form repository-specific skill candidates, and finally consolidates consistent patterns across repositories into transferable skills across repositories. The evolution is driven by an external writer-evaluator loop that generates and assesses skills while keeping the underlying coding model frozen. The loop externally updates the writer and evaluator policies to improve subsequent skill generation and assessment. This hierarchy progressively filters task-specific details while preserving procedures that generalize across diverse coding environments. Successful trajectories yield reusable guidance for future tasks, while failed trajectories reveal recurring failure modes that guide avoidance and recovery. We evaluate HSE on SWE-bench Verified and DeepSWE, using GLM-5.2 across Pi and Claude Code harnesses and GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 with Pi. Across both benchmarks, 10 skills evolved solely from SWE-Gym improve coding performance across all evaluated settings, demonstrating transfer across benchmarks, coding models, and agent harnesses. We further evolve the skill library from target-benchmark trajectories without verifier feedback, relying solely on the learned evaluator for candidate assessment and achieving additional gains through benchmark-tailored skills.