Three Levels of Capability Update

Agent behavior changes in three complementary ways:

1. in-task contextual adaptation – instantaneous, but session-bound;
2. updating external artifacts between tasks – knowledge, prompts, Skills, programs: verifiable, auditable;
3. parameter updates in the training loop (post-training) – expensive, but yields broad generalization for capabilities difficult to express explicitly.

The three pathways operate on different timescales.

Related: Continuous Agent Evolution, Three Stages of Post-Training