vscode sessions.instructions.md

Routing instructions for work on the VS Code Agents Window, directing developers to its focused development guidance before implementation, review, or design work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Starting Agents Window development, design, or code review, and finding the correct skill and guidance to use before making changes.
Why use it?
They ensure changes follow the dedicated rules for this part of the product and keep corrective feedback in the separate learning process.

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

Made for: GitHub Copilot.

Per session 88 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 88 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 $0.00088 $0.00088
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00044
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00018
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00009

Measured yesterday against content hash e77b29ada4b6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

vscode sessions.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/instructions/sessions.instructions.md · 11 lines

What it actually says

Agents Window

Before implementation, review, or design work in this area, invoke the sessions skill. It owns the basic principles, focused-document routing, and rules for maintaining that guidance.

Do not append corrective feedback here. Use the feedback-learning skill to classify it and apply the learning-memory budget.

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 · 11 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A e77b29ada4b6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

vscode sessions.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (190,061 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session, about $0.0004 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.