Skill Recorder is a desktop app that watches a person perform a task and uses GitHub Copilot CLI to turn the session into an ordered procedure for an AI agent. People use it to create reusable skills or automations from demonstrated work.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/skill-recorder. 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/skill-recorder/main/.github/copilot-instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/skill-recorderWrote 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/skill-recorder/copilot-instructions)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/skill-recorder/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/skill-recorder/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/skill-recorder/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/skill-recorder/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 | $0.00280 | $0.00280 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00112 | $0.00112 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00056 | $0.00056 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00028 | $0.00028 |
Grade A, and why
skill-recorder 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 2mo 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
Repository instructions for coding agents
Pull requests target the active release branch, not main
Ongoing work in this repository lands on the current release branch, not main.
Release branches are named release/<semver> — currently release/0.3.0, the
highest-versioned release/* branch on origin. main trails the release branch and
only advances when a version is cut and merged (see RELEASING.md).
Unless a task explicitly says otherwise:
-
Base new work on the current release branch, not
main:git fetch origin git switch -c <your-branch> origin/release/0.3.0 -
Open pull requests with the current release branch as the base, not
main:gh pr create --repo microsoft/skill-recorder --base release/0.3.0 --head <your-branch> -
Find the current release branch (pick the highest semver) with:
git ls-remote --heads origin 'release/*'
Target main only for the release merge described in RELEASING.md.
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 32 lines · 280 tokens per session scan A 73a54fb9a8d4
skill-recorder copilot-instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/skill-recorder (5,697 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 280 tokens to every session, about $0.0011 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.
skill-recorder copilot-instructions.md compared with instructions from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| skill-recorder copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/skill-recorder | Instructions file | 5.7k | 2d ago | MIT | A | 280 | GitHub Copilot |
| vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 9,719 | GitHub Copilot |
| next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js | Instructions file | 143k | today | MIT | A | 7,461 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 5,516 | GitHub Copilot |
| langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain | Instructions file | 149k | today | MIT | A | 4,680 | Codex, OpenCode |
| vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode | Instructions file | 195k | today | MIT | A | 3,093 | GitHub Copilot |
| deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness | Instructions file | 274k | 2d ago | MIT | A | 4,313 | Codex, OpenCode |