Not so obvious, because the model still needs to look up the required doc. The article glances over this detail a little bit unfortunately. The model needs to decide when to use a skill, but doesn’t it also need to decide when to look up documentation instead of relying on pretraining data?

Removing the skill does remove a level of indirection.

It's a difference of "choose whether or not to make use of a skill that would THEN attempt to find what you need in the docs" vs. "here's a list of everything in the docs that you might need."

I believe the skills would contain the documentation. It would have been nice for them to give more information on the granularity of the skills they created though.