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 agentmods add skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/copilot-agent-advisornpx skills add microsoft/cat-agent-skills --skill copilot-agent-advisorgit 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/copilot-agent-advisor)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/copilot-agent-advisor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/copilot-agent-advisor.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 | $0.00207 | $0.02928 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00103 | $0.01464 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00041 | $0.00586 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00293 |
Grade A, and why
copilot-agent-advisor 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 6d 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 — 140 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Overview
This skill helps a user pick the right way to deliver an AI experience in the Microsoft 365 + Copilot Studio ecosystem. It gathers the handful of factors that actually drive the decision (data sources, models, orchestration, channels, autonomy, collaboration, compliance, and skill/speed), maps them to one of three options, and returns a clear, reasoned recommendation with a runner-up and how to build it. It also advises which Copilot Studio harness (GitHub Copilot, standard, or Copilot chat) to build on.
The three options it chooses between:
| Option | What it is | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Use Microsoft 365 Copilot as-is | The built-in Copilot experience over Microsoft Graph data, no build. | Built-in capabilities + your Microsoft 365 data already cover the need; you don't need extra knowledge, custom instructions, or actions. |
| Standard agent (declarative agent) | Copilot configured with your instructions, knowledge, and actions, running on Copilot's own orchestrator and foundation models, inside Microsoft 365 apps. | You want to tailor Copilot for a focused scenario, stay inside Microsoft 365 (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Word), inherit Microsoft 365 compliance/RAI, and ship fast with low-code or a streamlined pro-code path. |
| Custom agent (custom engine agent) | A fully custom agent where you bring your own orchestrator and models, with custom/complex workflows, its own hosting, and multi-channel reach. | You need custom orchestration, your own/fine-tuned/domain models, deterministic complex business logic, proactive/autonomous behavior, group collaboration, delivery outside Microsoft 365, or you're integrating an existing external bot. |
When to Use
- The user describes an agent/automation scenario and asks what to build.
- The user asks to compare declarative vs custom engine agents, standard vs custom agents, or Copilot Studio vs plain Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- The user asks which Copilot Studio harness to build on (GitHub Copilot, standard, or Copilot chat).
- The user is unsure whether they even need to build an agent at all.
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.
- 6d ago First seen · 140 lines · 207 tokens per session scan A f4acb24148d9
copilot-agent-advisor is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (64 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 207 tokens to every session and 2,928 once invoked, about $0.0010 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.
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