One search for your own team's files and the public ecosystem. See how real projects write their agent instructions, and bring the good ideas home.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/design-philosophy/SKILL.md
The VS Code design philosophy — a shared Values→Principles→Moves vocabulary for reasoning about UI in design terms instead of raw pixels. Use when designing, building, reviewing, or giving feedback on any visual surface; when deciding a radius, spacing, type role, icon size, border, color, or motion; or when translating a "this feels off" observation into a concrete, principled fix.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/doc-comments/SKILL.md
Update doc comments
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/experiments/SKILL.md
Use when adding, changing, or reviewing a VS Code A/B experiment, either an experiment-controlled setting or a treatment read with the assignment service, and when deciding whether and where to log an `experimentTrigger` event for a triggered ExP scorecard.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/feature-tryouts/SKILL.md
Use when adding, reviewing, or troubleshooting an interactive release-note Try This experience, including commands, views, editor samples, Chat drafts, guided spotlights, prerequisites, scoped targets, or Agents-window handoff.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/feedback-learning/SKILL.md
Classify and record explicit corrective feedback without turning skills or instructions into append-only knowledge dumps.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/fix-ci-failures/SKILL.md
Investigate and fix CI failures on a pull request. Use when CI checks fail on a PR branch — covers finding the PR, identifying failed checks, downloading logs and artifacts, extracting the failure cause, and iterating on a fix. Requires the `gh` CLI.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/fixissueno/SKILL.md
fixIssueNo
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/flaky-smoke-tests/SKILL.md
Diagnose intermittent VS Code Electron smoke-test failures from the Azure DevOps Flaky Smoke Tests pipeline (definition 700). Covers finding failed iterations, downloading task logs and platform artifacts with Azure CLI, correlating cumulative runner logs, tracing the introducing commit, and queueing focused validation runs.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/heap-snapshot-analysis/SKILL.md
Analyze V8 heap snapshots to investigate memory leaks and retention issues. Use when given .heapsnapshot files, asked to compare before/after snapshots, asked to find what retains objects, or investigating why objects survive GC. Provides snapshot parsing, comparison, retainer-path helpers, and scratchpad scripts.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/integrated-browser/SKILL.md
Use this when working on the VS Code integrated browser ("browserView") to understand its architecture and mental model. Covers the embedded Chromium browser, its editor tab, navigation, overlay/layout, sessions, and agent browser tools under `src/vs/platform/browserView` and `src/vs/workbench/contrib/browserView`.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/integration-tests/SKILL.md
Use when running integration tests in the VS Code repo. Covers scripts/test-integration.sh (macOS/Linux) and scripts/test-integration.bat (Windows), their supported arguments for filtering, and the difference between node.js integration tests and extension host tests.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/issue-grouping/SKILL.md
Group similar issues.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/memory-leak-audit/SKILL.md
Audit code for memory leaks and disposable issues. Use when reviewing event listeners, DOM handlers, lifecycle callbacks, or fixing leak reports. Covers addDisposableListener, Event.once, MutableDisposable, DisposableStore, and onWillDispose patterns.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/migrate-issues/SKILL.md
migrate GitHub issues from one repository to another
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/otel/SKILL.md
OpenTelemetry guidance for VS Code agent experiences. Use when changing Agent Host telemetry, local Copilot Chat telemetry, provider-native spans or metrics, OTel settings and managed policy, trace persistence/export, or monitoring documentation.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/policy-and-managed-settings/SKILL.md
Use whenever adding, modifying, or reviewing any Copilot, agent, LLM, AI, tool, permission, sandbox, MCP, model, telemetry, feature-gate, setting, configuration, or enterprise control—especially anything an organization or administrator may need to manage. Start here to decide whether it belongs in runtime managed settings, a typed SDK contract, VS Code configuration policy, extension policy, or a split implementation. Run on every new Copilot/agent/LLM control and ANY change that adds a `policy:` field.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/sessions/SKILL.md
Core principles and workflow router for changes to the Agents Window under src/vs/sessions.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/setup-environment/SKILL.md
First Time Setup
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/smoke-tests/SKILL.md
Use when running VS Code smoke tests or working on smoke-test CI steps. Covers npm run smoketest / smoketest-no-compile, grep filtering tests, and a temporary repeat-loop technique for tracking down flaky smoke tests in CI.
MicrosoftSkillmicrosoft/vscode/.github/skills/sweeper-implement/SKILL.md
Implement a VS Code Sweeper agent-ready issue — fetch the sweeper's review record from its state repo, implement the change in the current vscode checkout from the review's brief (an implement-ready record) or from an approved sweeper-plan file, validate the diff against it, and — after the maintainer has reviewed the changes in their editor — open a draft PR. Use ONLY when the request explicitly asks for the sweeper — "sweeper-implement", "sweeper", "vscodesweeper", a sweeper record, an agent-ready issue, or a sweeper brief — or asks to implement a sweeper plan ("implement plan <n>", a `.sweeper/plans/issue-<n>.md` file). Do NOT use for a plain "fix this issue" request that doesn't mention the sweeper; fix those directly with your normal tools instead.
Plain text files in a repository that tell a coding agent how the project works: commands to run, conventions to follow and things to avoid. CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, cursor rules and skills are the common kinds.
CLAUDE.md is read by Claude Code. AGENTS.md is an open format that Codex, Cursor and other agents read. Many projects keep one and point the other at it.
A folder with a SKILL.md that describes one capability, such as filling PDFs or reviewing code. The agent loads it only when the task calls for it.
Your agents already can, over MCP, limited to the files you're allowed to read. Searching them from this page is coming.
