# Preprint proposes token-budgeted skill selection for LLM agents

_Friday, August 21, 2026 at 12:00 AM EDT · AI, Science · Latest · Tier 2 — Notable_

A preprint introduces Best Prefix Selection, an algorithm for choosing reusable skill documents for LLM agents within a hard context-token budget. The authors model selection as maximizing submodular benefit minus a context penalty. On a contamination-controlled BigCodeBench variant, they report 0.73 task success, versus 0.20 to 0.52 for released routers, retrievers and the executor's own selection, while using 28% fewer tokens than the strongest released router. The findings have not been independently verified.

## Sources

- [cs.AI updates on arXiv.org](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.19993)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/1Z4wVmcrr7xm53ePcIRRKK
Retrieved: 2026-08-21T11:09:51.617Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)