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/instructions/incremental-terminal-ui-build.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/incremental-terminal-ui-build)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/intelligent-terminal/incremental-terminal-ui-build"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/intelligent-terminal/incremental-terminal-ui-build/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/incremental-terminal-ui-build"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/intelligent-terminal/incremental-terminal-ui-build.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 | $0.01127 | $0.01127 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00451 | $0.00451 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00225 | $0.00225 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00113 | $0.00113 |
Grade A, and why
intelligent-terminal incremental-terminal-ui-build.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 7d 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 — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Incremental Terminal UI builds
Use the existing MSBuild dependency graph. Optimize the changed project, not the solution, and preserve coherent generated code, resources, and runtime payloads. Follow AGENTS.md and the contributor build guide for environment setup and general build/deployment commands; this file covers UI-specific correctness.
Select the smallest correct build
- Pin the configuration, architecture, branding, and active
SolutionDir. Do not reuse another worktree's output or mix branding outputs. - Use
/t:Build, not/t:Rebuildor a clean solution build, for ordinary iteration. Preserve dependency tracking and PCH reuse. - Set
BuildProjectReferences=falseonly after the referenced projects' generated headers, libraries, metadata, and resources exist and are up to date for the pinned configuration, architecture, branding, and referenced sources in this worktree. Build a missing or stale dependency rather than copying another tree's output. - For a
.cpp-only TerminalApp change, build AppLib, then link App DLL. Reuse unchanged WTA output; do not rebuild Rust for C++-only changes. - For IDL changes, allow MIDL, metadata merging, cppwinrt generation, and all affected native compilation. Do not constrain the build to one source file.
- For XAML changes, regenerate bindings, compiled XAML, and resource indexes. Copying source XAML is not an equivalent build.
- Do not use bare
ClCompile;Linkas an AppLib pipeline. Do not adopt selected-file or packaging-target shortcuts without measuring them and verifying complete outputs.
Warmed Debug x64 Dev example
Replace <worktree> with the active worktree's absolute path:
cd /d "<worktree>"
call tools\razzle.cmd
set "P=/p:Configuration=Debug /p:Platform=x64 /p:WindowsTerminalBranding=Dev /p:BuildProjectReferences=false /v:minimal /nologo"
msbuild src\cascadia\TerminalApp\TerminalAppLib.vcxproj /t:Build %P% "/p:SolutionDir=<worktree>\\" && msbuild src\cascadia\TerminalApp\dll\TerminalApp.vcxproj /t:Build %P% "/p:SolutionDir=<worktree>\\"
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.
- 7d ago First seen · 84 lines · 1,127 tokens per session scan A cb10c5f9b72c
intelligent-terminal incremental-terminal-ui-build.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/intelligent-terminal (2,056 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 1,127 tokens to every session, about $0.0045 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 2026-10-09.
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