HVE Core is a collection of agents, prompts, coding instructions, and skills for building repeatable software-development workflows with GitHub Copilot. It is intended for individuals and teams that want structured AI-assisted research, planning, implementation, and review, while the catalogue entries provide many of its reusable workflow components.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/hve-core. 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/hve-core/main/.github/copilot-instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/hve-coreWrote 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/hve-core/copilot-instructions)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/hve-core/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/hve-core/copilot-instructions/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/hve-core/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/hve-core/copilot-instructions.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 | $0.04479 | $0.04479 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.01792 | $0.01792 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00896 | $0.00896 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00448 | $0.00448 |
Grade A, and why
hve-core copilot-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 5d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 299 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
General Instructions
Items in the Highest Priority Rules section from attached instructions files override any conflicting guidance.
Priority Rules
- Conventions and styling from the codebase take precedence for all changes.
- Instructions files not already attached are read before deciding on edits.
- Breaking changes are acceptable.
- Backward-compatibility layers or legacy support are added only when explicitly requested.
- Tests, scripts, and one-off markdown docs are created or modified only when the requested change or its directly required support work needs them.
- Before a dependency-backed npm command, establish the relevant package root with
npm ciwhen no successful installation for its current lockfile is known. Treat the repository root anddocs/docusaurusindependently; do not substitutenpm installor reinstall a known-current root. - Generic validation uses local-safe commands and does not select
ci:*commands. A command in a plan, README, template, prior log, catalog, or error is a reference, not an execution request. A task that specifically asks to run or reproduce a named CI lane may use its ordinaryci:*command. - Browser installation, model or moderation environments, service startup, credentials, execution outside the sandbox, interactive UI, and adjacent CI lanes are separate actions. Do not infer them from generic validation or a failed command.
Rules for comments:
- Remain brief and factual, describing behavior, intent, invariants, and edge cases.
- Thought processes, step-by-step reasoning, and narrative comments do not appear in code.
- Comments that contradict current behavior are removed or updated.
- Temporal markers (phase references, dates, task IDs) are removed from code files during any edit.
Rules for markdown frontmatter:
- When editing any Markdown file whose frontmatter already contains an
ms.datefield, update that field to today's date. - Format the date using ISO 8601 (
YYYY-MM-DD), matching the existingms.dateconvention.
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.
- 5d ago Changed · +2 lines · +115 tokens per session e8e7e3236135
- 27d ago Changed · +31 tokens per session 9b03b404b17e
- 1mo ago Changed · +1 lines · +33 tokens per session 85b7b0450e86
- 1mo ago Changed · -1 lines · -21 tokens per session 7e4116f989f7
- 1mo ago Changed · -1 lines · -15 tokens per session 6ab9fdfe1a92
- 1mo ago First seen · 298 lines · 4,336 tokens per session scan A 2d58cbabe3bc
hve-core copilot-instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,580 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 4,479 tokens to every session, about $0.0179 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.
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