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 knowledge-retrievegit 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/knowledge-retrieve)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/knowledge-retrieve"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/knowledge-retrieve/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/knowledge-retrieve"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/knowledge-retrieve.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 | $0.00042 | $0.00239 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00017 | $0.00096 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00048 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00024 |
Grade A, and why
knowledge-retrieve 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 today.
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.
What it actually says
Knowledge Retrieve
Purpose
Approved-answer retrieval with citation - the response is grounded or it is a handoff.
When to use
After context-assemble in every run.
Inputs
assembled.json + knowledge base / approved scripts / policy documents.
Steps
- Retrieve the article(s) matching intent + context; keep article ids and clauses as citations.
- No article -> the run becomes a handoff with "no approved answer" recorded (#4.1).
Output
Payload with approved-answer sources attached.
Grounding requirements
Every answer sentence must be traceable to an article or policy clause.
Constraints
- Approved sources only; no answers from general knowledge about "how retail usually works".
Escalation / uncertainty
Conflicting articles -> handoff with both cited.
What ships with it
5 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.
- today First seen · 25 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 6b99a76a9be2
knowledge-retrieve is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (93 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 239 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-10-28.
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