.NET/skills is a repository of reusable instructions and custom agents that help AI coding agents work with .NET and C#. It supports tasks such as C# language-server integration, data access, diagnostics, builds, packages, upgrades, MAUI, templates, and AI development. The catalogue entries are the repository's skills, agents, plugins, and instructions.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to dotnet/skills. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dotnet/skills/main/AGENTS.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dotnet/skillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/dotnet/skills/agents-md)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/dotnet/skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/dotnet/skills/agents-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/dotnet/skills/agents-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/dotnet/skills/agents-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00442 | $0.00442 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00177 | $0.00177 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00088 | $0.00088 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00044 | $0.00044 |
Grade A, and why
skills AGENTS.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 15d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
What it actually says
Repository Instructions
This repository contains skill plugins under plugins/. Each subdirectory in plugins/ is an independent plugin (e.g., plugins/dotnet-msbuild, plugins/dotnet).
Working on skills and evals
Use the repository's own authoring skills under .agents/skills/ instead of improvising:
create-skill— scaffolding a new skill, and writing adescriptionthe runtime will route to.create-skill-test— writing or resizing aneval.yaml. Evals use the Vally schema (stimuli:/graders:/defaults:);scenarios:/assertions:no longer load.improve-skill-quality— an eval regressed, produced no verdict, or the skill did not activate. Classify the failure before editing skill content; broken fixtures, underpowered trial counts and harness errors routinely masquerade as skill regressions.
Before pushing eval changes, run python eng/eval-quality/check_eval_quality.py. It blocks 22
structural defect classes documented in eng/eval-quality/README.md that can corrupt a real
evaluation result.
The distilled quality rules — what makes a skill beat its own baseline — live in the "Quality bar"
section of CONTRIBUTING.md.
Skill-Validator
The skill-validator is a shipping tool — its NuGet package and .tar.gz archives are built from eng/skill-validator/src/. Content referenced at runtime or bundled with the tool (docs, README, etc.) must live under src/ so it is included in the published output. Do not add references from src/ to files outside of it, except for explicitly linked packaging assets (such as the repo-root LICENSE file) referenced by the project file.
When modifying the evaluation pipeline (evaluation.yml), results JSON schema (Models.cs), or the skill-validator evaluation logic, review and update eng/skill-validator/src/docs/InvestigatingResults.md to keep the failure investigation guidance, schema documentation, and example scripts in sync.
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 15d ago Changed · +1 tokens per session 4ec4a2b04b13
- 1mo ago First seen · 28 lines · 441 tokens per session scan A b8a750837482
skills AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository dotnet/skills (5,696 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 442 tokens to every session, about $0.0018 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
Other instructions, from other repositories
vscode buildNext.instructions.md
Working notes and architecture documentation for the new esbuild-based build system in build/next. Use when making changes to the new build pipeline (transpile/bundle commands, NLS plugin, source-map handling, resource copying, or self-hosting watch tasks).
next.js AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for vercel/next.js, covering next.js development guide, codebase structure, monorepo overview, core package: packages/next and other important packages.
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.md
Instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code oss third-party-notices pipeline, architecture, pipeline flow in ci, cache eligibility and rollout and applying the notice (cutover).
langchain AGENTS.md
AGENTS.md instructions for langchain-ai/langchain, covering global development guidelines for the langchain monorepo, corridor security analysis, project architecture and context, monorepo structure and development tools & commands.
vscode copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for microsoft/vscode, covering vs code copilot instructions, project overview, root folders, core architecture (src/ folder) and built-in extensions (extensions/ folder).
deno copilot-instructions.md
Copilot instructions for denoland/deno, covering deno development guide for github copilot, network access, high level overview, key directories and key files to understand first.