Don't Vibe Code, Do Skele-Code: Interactive No-Code Notebooks for Subject Matter Experts to Build Lower-Cost Agentic Workflows

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 18 Mar 2026] Don't Vibe Code, Do Skele-Code: Interactive No-Code Notebooks for Subject Matter Experts to Build Lower-Cost Agentic Workflows Sriram Gopalakrishnan Skele-Code is a natural-language and graph-based interface for building workflows with AI agents, designed especially for less or non-technical users. It supports incremental, interactive notebook-style development, and each step is converted to code with a required set of functions and behavior to enable incremental building of workflows. Agents are invoked only for code generation and error recovery, not orchestration or task execution. This agent-supported, but code-first approach to workflows, along with the context-engineering used in Skele-Code, can help reduce token costs compared to the multi-agent system approach to executing workflows. Skele-Code produces modular, easily extensible, and shareable workflows. The generated workflows can also be used as skills by agents, or as steps in other workflows. Comments: Main paper 9 pages. Topics: Agentic Coding, HCI, LLMs, Workflows Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Programming Languages (cs.PL); Systems and Control (eess.SY) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18122 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.18122v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18122 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Sriram Gopalakrishnan [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:37:29 UTC (576 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC cs.PL cs.SY eess eess.SY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)