Intelligent Terminal is an experimental fork of Windows Terminal that adds native support for AI agents through the Agent Client Protocol. It is for Windows users who want to manage compatible agent command-line tools alongside terminal tabs, profiles, themes, shells, and keyboard shortcuts, and the catalogue entries provide instructions, skills, hooks, and a plugin for working with it.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/intelligent-terminal. 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/intelligent-terminal/main/.github/copilot-instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/intelligent-terminalWrote 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/intelligent-terminal/copilot-instructions)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/intelligent-terminal/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/intelligent-terminal/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/intelligent-terminal/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/intelligent-terminal/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 | $0.01953 | $0.01953 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00781 | $0.00781 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00391 | $0.00391 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00195 | $0.00195 |
Grade A, and why
intelligent-terminal 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 1mo 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 — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Copilot Instructions for Windows Terminal
This is the source repository for Windows Terminal, Windows Console Host (conhost.exe), and shared components between them. It is a large C++ codebase built with MSBuild/Visual Studio targeting Windows.
Build
Requires Visual Studio (preferably Visual Studio 2026) with "Desktop Development with C++" and "Universal Windows Platform Development" workloads, plus the Windows 11 SDK (10.0.22621.0). The solution uses the .slnx format (OpenConsole.slnx), which requires MSBuild 17.10 or later. If you get "Invalid input 'OpenConsole.slnx'. The file type was not recognized.", update Visual Studio.
Build uses MSBuild via the CMD razzle environment. Run razzle.cmd once per terminal session to set up the environment, then use the build commands. Since razzle sets env vars in CMD, chain commands with && when calling from PowerShell (e.g., cmd /c ".\tools\razzle.cmd && bz"):
.\tools\razzle.cmd & rem One-time setup per session: finds MSBuild, sets PATH and env vars
bcz & rem Clean build the full solution (Debug by default)
bcz rel & rem Clean build in Release
bz & rem Incremental build (no clean) — much faster for iterating
bz rel & rem Incremental Release build
To build only the project in the current directory (instead of the full solution), cd into a project folder and use the exclusive variants:
cd src\cascadia\TerminalApp
bx & rem Incremental build of just this project
bcx & rem Clean + build of just this project
Three configurations exist: Debug, Release, and AuditMode (enables extra static analysis via CppCoreCheck).
Running
OpenConsole (console host): From a razzle environment, run opencon to launch OpenConsole.exe from the build output.
Windows Terminal: You cannot launch WindowsTerminal.exe directly — it is a packaged app. The easiest way is F5 in Visual Studio with CascadiaPackage as the startup project (set Debug > Application/Background process to "Native Only"). From the command line in a razzle environment:
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 134 lines · 1,953 tokens per session scan A e0cbd2b3718a
intelligent-terminal copilot-instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/intelligent-terminal (2,074 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 1,953 tokens to every session, about $0.0078 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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