PromptKit copilot-instructions.md

Repository instructions for PromptKit, a library of Markdown and YAML components that assembles prompts from personas, procedures, output formats, categories, and templates.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them when writing requirements, investigating bugs, reviewing code, or selecting and combining PromptKit components for a task.
Why use it?
They explain how the repository fits together and direct contributors to the required prompt-building entry point. This avoids treating the library like a normal application with runtime code.

Instructions file for GitHub Copilot

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add instructions/microsoft/promptkit/copilot-instructions
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/PromptKit

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Per session 1,144 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,144 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.01144 $0.01144
Opus 5 $0.00572 $0.00572
Sonnet 5 $0.00229 $0.00229
Haiku 4.5 $0.00114 $0.00114

Measured yesterday against content hash 41b837845ec6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

PromptKit 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 yesterday.

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.

.github/copilot-instructions.md · 139 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 139 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PromptKit — Copilot Instructions

How to Use This Repository

When a user asks you to perform a task that this library supports (writing requirements, investigating bugs, reviewing code, etc.), use the /promptkit skill (or read and execute bootstrap.md). It is the entry point that guides component selection, parameter gathering, and prompt assembly. Do not try to answer the task directly — assemble the right prompt first.

What This Repository Is

PromptKit is a composable prompt library, not a software application. There is no build system, no runtime, and no application code. Every file is Markdown or YAML — the "code" is prose that LLMs consume.

The core loop: bootstrap.md reads manifest.yaml to discover components, then assembles them into task-specific prompts from five composable layers: personasprotocolsformatstaxonomiestemplates.

Architecture

Templates are the orchestration layer. Each template declares which persona, protocols, and format to compose via YAML frontmatter. The bootstrap engine reads these declarations from manifest.yaml and assembles a single coherent prompt in this order:

  1. Identity (persona)
  2. Reasoning Protocols (one or more, in order)
  3. Classification Taxonomy (if applicable)
  4. Output Format (structure rules)
  5. Task (template with {{param}} placeholders filled)
  6. Non-Goals

Templates can chain via pipelines — each declares input_contract / output_contract with artifact types (e.g., requirements-documentdesign-document). The document-lifecycle pipeline chains requirements → design, plus validation consuming requirements and optionally design.

Component Conventions

All components use kebab-case filenames matching their name field.

Protocols have three categories with different scoping rules:

  • guardrails/ — Cross-cutting, apply to all tasks (anti-hallucination, self-verification, operational-constraints)
  • analysis/ — Domain/language-specific checks (memory-safety-c, security-vulnerability). Language-specific protocols are separate files, not conditional blocks.
  • reasoning/ — Systematic reasoning approaches (root-cause-analysis, requirements-elicitation)

Read the full file on GitHub · 139 lines

Changes

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.

  1. yesterday First seen · 139 lines · 1,144 tokens per session scan A 41b837845ec6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

PromptKit copilot-instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/PromptKit (102 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 1,144 tokens to every session, about $0.0057 per session on Opus 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.