Skills and Goals
Why It Matters
Section titled “Why It Matters”Tools expose action surfaces. Skills encode know-how about when and how to act. A calendar tool can create an event; a scheduling skill inspects constraints, negotiates alternatives, uses the tool and confirms the result. A social skill may guide reflective dialogue, assumption-checking, repair after misunderstanding or long-term planning.
Goals need similar discipline. Some goals are user-given, some role-derived, some task-local, some relational and some normative. They can conflict. A user may ask for speed while a policy requires approval; a relationship norm may favor direct challenge while the current situation requires restraint.
Skill learning lets agents improve without changing model weights. Repeated success can become a versioned procedure. Repeated failure can trigger revision or deprecation. This is especially important for social AI, where opaque personality shifts are hard to audit and hard for users to correct.