SkillForge: Self-Distilling Agents for Project-Specific Issue Resolution

TL;DR - SkillForge is a self-distillation framework that teaches coding agents repository-specific knowledge before they encounter real issues. It matters because it improves downstream issue resolution without requiring historical repair data or costly per-issue exploration.

• Synthesizes project-specific issues by reimplementing test-covered core repository functionality.
• Resolves these synthetic issues to distill reusable, entity-grounded skills linked to relevant repository entities.
• Proactively addresses repository knowledge gaps rather than discovering them during real issue resolution.
• Experiments with open- and closed-source models consistently outperform strong baselines.