Agentic-Agile Template is a development methodology and starter template for building software through structured collaboration between people and AI coding agents. Development teams use it to organize backlogs, write detailed specifications, coordinate parallel agent work, govern changes, and measure the process. The catalogue entries encode parts of this methodology as instructions and rules.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/agentic-agile-template. 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/microsoft/agentic-agile-template/main/.github/instructions/agent-skills.instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/agentic-agile-templateWrote 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/microsoft/agentic-agile-template/agent-skills)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/agentic-agile-template/agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/agentic-agile-template/agent-skills/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/microsoft/agentic-agile-template/agent-skills"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/agentic-agile-template/agent-skills.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 | $0.00394 | $0.00394 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00158 | $0.00158 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00079 | $0.00079 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00039 | $0.00039 |
Grade A, and why
agentic-agile-template agent-skills.instructions.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 2d 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
Agent Skill Guidelines
Create each skill in .github/skills/<lowercase-hyphenated-name>/ with a
SKILL.md entry point.
Discovery metadata
- Include YAML frontmatter with
nameanddescription. - Keep
namelowercase and hyphenated, with at most 64 characters. - Make
descriptionstate what the skill does, when to use it, and the terms a user is likely to mention.
Progressive disclosure
- Keep
SKILL.mdfocused on activation, prerequisites, the safe workflow, and gotchas. - Put detailed contracts in
references/. - Put deterministic automation in
scripts/. - Put starter configuration and output bodies in
templates/. - Reference bundled resources with relative links.
Script requirements
- Prefer cross-platform standard-library Python for complex automation.
- Provide
--help, deterministic errors, and explicit exit codes. - Default to read-only or dry-run behavior. Make writes explicit.
- Never store credentials. Reuse existing credential helpers.
- Redact credentials and authorization headers from diagnostics.
- Use atomic writes for persistent state and generated artifacts.
- Add tests for safety boundaries, reruns, partial failures, and malformed input.
Content quality
- Document non-obvious constraints in a
Gotchassection. - Distinguish observed evidence from inferred intent.
- Avoid repository-specific paths, identities, snapshots, and counts.
- Keep
SKILL.mdbelow 500 lines; move workflows longer than five steps to a reference file.
Validation
- Verify frontmatter and relative links.
- Run bundled tests and every public command's help output.
- Search for placeholders, credentials, personal identifiers, and repository-specific literals before publication.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 51 lines · 394 tokens per session scan A dfd3c55f7727
agentic-agile-template agent-skills.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/agentic-agile-template (98 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 394 tokens to every session, about $0.0016 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 2026-10-23.
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