microsoft/cat-agent-skills is a static website that catalogs reusable instruction sets and related packages for AI agents. People use it to search, filter, rate, and download skills for Cowork, Copilot Studio, and Scout, along with Copilot plugins and Scout automations. The catalogue entries are the skills, instructions, plugins, and settings displayed by the site.
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.
npx skills add microsoft/cat-agent-skills --skill answer-researchgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/cat-agent-skillsWrote 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/cat-agent-skills/answer-research)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/answer-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/answer-research/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/cat-agent-skills/answer-research"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/answer-research.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 | $0.00110 | $0.01784 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00044 | $0.00714 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00357 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00178 |
Grade A, and why
answer-research 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 134 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Answer Research
Domain: Customer Service.
Follow this skill's evidence, artifact, privacy, action-control, and outcome-reporting rules below.
Evidence and connectivity
Begin with authorized user-provided material and accessible work sources. Discover optional CRM, knowledge, communication, quality, and workflow capabilities at runtime and use them only to enrich or execute the job; never require a vendor, connector, record identifier, object name, or field name when the minimum semantic evidence is otherwise available.
If a capability is unconfigured, unavailable, denied, stale, partial, or unsupported, continue with the supported baseline, disclose the affected scope, and block only the dependent conclusion or action. Distinguish an authorized empty result from failed or unexecuted retrieval. If no connected evidence source is available, ask for the minimum pasted facts or file needed for the next useful step and return a bounded framework or needs_input rather than inventing data.
Use supplied material and authorized knowledge, policy, issue, correspondence, and attachment sources that can answer the resolved question. Search or connected CRM access is optional enrichment. Preserve authority, applicability, effective date, source coverage, contradictions, and the difference between no matching evidence and failed retrieval.
Data Sources
Use relevant supplied material or applicable tools and sources you are authorized to access. These are options, not a mandatory checklist. Ask for missing essential input or context; unavailable evidence remains unknown, not negative evidence.
- Knowledge & Files for governing policies, articles, effective dates, exceptions and source-authority rules.
- Record Snapshots & Exports for customer or issue facts needed to test the applicable criterion.
- Email & Attachments for the actual question, customer-provided evidence and material contradictions.
- Public official guidance for applicable product or policy facts absent internally, without assuming it overrides governing internal sources.
What ships with it
2 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.
- 2d ago First seen · 134 lines · 110 tokens per session scan A 4d5313133b3b
answer-research is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (101 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 110 tokens to every session and 1,784 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-11-06.
answer-research compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| answer-researchmicrosoft/cat-agent-skills | Skill | 101 | yesterday | MIT | A | 110 | Claude Code, Codex |
| imagegenopenai/codex | Skill | 134k | today | Apache-2.0 | A | 113 | Codex |
| local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners | Skill | 79k | yesterday | MIT | A | 200 | Claude Code, Codex |
| playwright-climicrosoft/playwright | Skill | 100k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 19 | Claude Code |
| browser-automationopenclaw/openclaw | Skill | 394k | today | MIT | A | 36 | Claude Code |
| systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers | Skill | 314k | 4d ago | MIT | A | 21 | Claude Code |
| next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js | Skill | 143k | today | MIT | A | 95 | Claude Code |