vscode oss.instructions.md

Code-review instructions for checking open-source licence files in VS Code, including third-party notices and dependency records.

In plain words
What is it for?
Reviewing changes to ThirdPartyNotices.txt, cglicenses.json, and cgmanifest.json; checking licence text, package versions, repository links, sorting, and SPDX identifiers.
Why use it?
They help catch incorrect, missing, stale, or mismatched licence information before it ships, including newly added copyleft licences that need review.

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/vscode/oss
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Per session 286 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 286 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 $0.00286 $0.00286
Opus 5 $0.00143 $0.00143
Sonnet 5 $0.00057 $0.00057
Haiku 4.5 $0.00029 $0.00029

Measured 2d ago against content hash fe4dfb436f27, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vscode oss.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 2d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

.github/instructions/oss.instructions.md · 35 lines

What it actually says

OSS License Review

When reviewing changes to these files, verify:

ThirdPartyNotices.txt

  • Every new entry has a license type header (e.g., "MIT License", "Apache License 2.0")
  • License text is present and non-empty for every entry
  • License text matches the declared license type (e.g., MIT-declared entry actually contains MIT license text, not Apache)
  • Removed entries are cleanly removed (no leftover fragments)
  • Entries are sorted alphabetically by package name

cglicenses.json

  • New overrides have a justification comment
  • No obviously stale entries for packages no longer in the dependency tree

cgmanifest.json

  • Package versions match what's actually installed
  • Repository URLs are valid and point to real source repositories
  • Newly added license identifiers should use SPDX format where possible
  • License identifiers match the corresponding ThirdPartyNotices.txt entries

Red Flags

  • Any newly added copyleft license (GPL, LGPL, AGPL) — flag immediately (existing copyleft entries like ffmpeg are pre-approved)
  • Any "UNKNOWN" or placeholder license text
  • License text that appears truncated or corrupted
  • A package declared as MIT but with Apache/BSD/other license text (or vice versa)
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. 2d ago First seen · 35 lines · 286 tokens per session scan A fe4dfb436f27

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vscode oss.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (190,061 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 286 tokens to every session, about $0.0014 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.