APM is a package manager for AI-agent configuration, using a manifest to declare reusable instructions, skills, prompts, agents, hooks, plugins, and MCP components. Development teams use it to reproduce agent setups across projects and control their dependencies through policies and lockfiles, while the catalogue contains many of these agent components.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/apm. 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/apm/main/.agents/skills/cut-release/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/apmWrote 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/skills/microsoft/apm/cut-release)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/apm/cut-release"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/apm/cut-release/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/skills/microsoft/apm/cut-release"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/apm/cut-release.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium Agent Snooping · line 52 Skill enumerates or reads other installed skills. Access to other skills' SKILL.md files or the skills directory reveals prompt instructions, capabilities, and secrets that should be invisible to peer skills.Fix: Remove all code or instructions that list or read other skills' files or directories. Skills should operate independently; cross-skill access is a privilege escalation.
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 | $0.00198 | $0.02580 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00079 | $0.01032 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00040 | $0.00516 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00020 | $0.00258 |
Grade A, and why
cut-release 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 1mo 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 — 254 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
cut-release -- assess, sanitize, bump, lint, open PR
This skill drives the release-cut workflow end-to-end on the current worktree. It STOPS at "PR open"; tagging is the human-gated trigger that fires the release workflow.
When to use
Trigger this skill on any of these intents:
- "cut a release"
- "ship v0.x" / "ship the release"
- "release prep" / "prepare the release"
- "bump and open the PR"
- "open the release PR"
- "what kind of release do we need now"
- "we have enough merged for a release"
- Any phrasing that ends in opening a release PR.
Do NOT trigger on:
- "tag v0.16.0" -- tagging is the post-merge step the operator runs.
- "publish a blog post" / "draft release notes for the website".
- "what changed since v0.15.0" -- enumeration only, no release.
- "regenerate uv.lock" / raw version-string edits.
- "rollback to v0.15.0" -- release reversal is a different skill.
Companion primitives
The skill DEPENDS on these existing primitives in the same source tree. Do not duplicate their content; reference them.
.apm/skills/apm-strategy/SKILL.md-- versioning judgement and breaking-change lens. Auto-loads via its own trigger onCHANGELOG.mdand release-pipeline edits. Treat it as the authoritative lens for "is this BREAKING" and "does this positioning change warrant a migration note"..apm/instructions/linting.instructions.md-- canonical CI-mirror lint chain. Reference; do not re-derive ruff / pylint command lists in this skill..github/instructions/changelog.instructions.md-- Keep-a- Changelog format contract. Reference; do not redefine the format.
Output charset rule
Per .github/instructions/encoding.instructions.md, source files in
this bundle (SKILL.md, assets, scripts) MUST stay in printable ASCII.
The PR body and changelog entries this skill produces are also
written to repo files (CHANGELOG.md, PR body), so they MUST stay
ASCII too. Use -- for em dashes, [!] / [+] / [x] for status
markers, and so on.
What ships with it
7 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 1mo ago Changed b1e9f26d3684
- 1mo ago First seen · 254 lines · 198 tokens per session scan A 07c15054e546
cut-release is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/apm (4,133 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 198 tokens to every session and 2,580 once invoked, about $0.0008 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
ship-notes
Write release notes or a pull-request body that a reviewer can act on — the smallest picture of the change, before-and-after evidence that it works, and whether it can be undone. Use in a Release phase for artifacts/release-notes.md, or whenever you write a PR description.
bump-version
Automate version bumping following semantic versioning and changelog management. Use when the user wants to bump a version, create a release, update the changelog, or tag a new version in a project using semver conventions and Keep a Changelog format.
gsd-complete-milestone
Archive completed milestone and prepare for next version.
changelog-gen
A changelog generator that turns Git history into a version-by-version record of project changes. A changelog is a readable summary of new features, fixes, breaking changes, documentation, and other updates.
git-branch-cleanup
Analyzes and safely cleans up local Git branches. Categorizes branches by merge status, staleness, and remote tracking. Provides interactive selection with safety guards. Use when the user wants to clean up branches, delete old branches, organize Git branches, or asks about which branches can be safely deleted.
aiwg-pr
AIWG-specific pull request delivery workflow for AIWG product/workspace changes; not the generic repository PR process.