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 monte-carlo-analysisgit 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/monte-carlo-analysis)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/monte-carlo-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/monte-carlo-analysis/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/monte-carlo-analysis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/monte-carlo-analysis.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00122 | $0.01320 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00061 | $0.00660 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00024 | $0.00264 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00132 |
Grade A, and why
monte-carlo-analysis 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 9d 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 — 114 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Convert an unstructured risk question into a structured Monte Carlo run via the
bundled scripts/monte_carlo.py toolkit. Sample from the right distribution,
summarise percentiles, and return a histogram PNG plus spreadsheet export.
Offer an interactive HTML chart when the user asks for it.
Instructions
-
Cognitive intake. Detect the core question (timeline, financial risk, yield, downtime, claims, etc.). If the user did not give enough numbers to parameterise a distribution, stop and ask — do not invent bounds. Prompt with the distribution options below.
-
Choose a distribution:
- Triangular — user gives Minimum, Most Likely (peak), Maximum.
- Normal — user gives Mean and Std Dev (optional
base_modifierfor portfolio / compounding style:outcome = base * (1 + return)). - Uniform — every value between Minimum and Maximum is equally likely.
- Log-normal — non-negative, right-skewed risks; user gives log-scale
meanandsigma. Highlight the Mean vs P50 gap when skew is large. - Poisson — count of rare events in a fixed interval; user gives
lambda(expected count per interval, e.g. outages per month). - Weibull — time-to-failure / reliability; user gives
shape(k) andscale(λ). Shape < 1 → infant mortality, = 1 → exponential, > 1 → wear-out. - Beta — bounded probability [0, 1] or percentage; user gives
alphaandbeta. Useful for proportions, conversion rates, or task-completion estimates. - Exponential — memoryless inter-arrival times; user gives
scale(mean = 1 / rate). Good for time between random events (calls, failures, requests).
-
Defaults. If simulations are unspecified, use
10000. Prefer a clearchart_titleandx_axis_labelin the user's domain units (days, USD, hours). -
Execute with the toolkit (import or CLI). Always produce:
- Summary stats: mean, P5, P50, P95
- PNG histogram with P5 / P50 / P95 marker lines
- CSV of all iterations (opens in Excel)
Also produce when asked:
- Interactive HTML — self-contained Chart.js page with live sliders per
distribution parameter, a simulations count slider, and a P-threshold
calculator (
P(outcome < X) = ?) .xlsxworkbook (requiresopenpyxl; otherwise point them to the CSV)
import sys
sys.path.insert(0, "scripts")
from monte_carlo import simulate
result = simulate({
"distribution": "triangular",
"low": 12, "peak": 18, "high": 45,
"simulations": 10000,
"chart_title": "Cloud migration duration (days)",
"x_axis_label": "Days",
"html": True, # optional interactive Chart.js page with live controls
"excel": True, # optional .xlsx (falls back to CSV if openpyxl missing)
"out_prefix": "simulation",
})
# result keys: mean, p5, p50, p95, brief_summary, chart_path, csv_path, …
-
Present results in domain language:
- P5 = downside / late / risk baseline
- P50 = median expectation
- P95 = optimistic / upper ceiling (or severe upside for cost/risk)
- Show or link the PNG; mention CSV/Excel paths; offer HTML if not requested yet.
- Always end with a brief summary (2–3 sentences). Prefer
result["brief_summary"]from the toolkit; you may lightly rephrase it into the user's domain (days, dollars, hours) without changing the numbers.
-
Response layout (adapt labels to the domain):
### Simulation Analytics Report
Ran {simulations} iterations ({distribution}).
| Metric | Value |
| --- | --- |
| P5 (risk baseline) | {p5} |
| P50 (median) | {p50} |
| P95 (upper) | {p95} |
| Mean | {mean} |
Histogram: {chart_path}
Raw iterations: {csv_path}
### Brief summary
{brief_summary}
What ships with it
10 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.
- assets/sample_exponential.json 176 B
- assets/sample_lognormal.json 213 B
- assets/sample_normal.json 233 B
- assets/sample_poisson.json 168 B
- assets/sample_triangular.json 215 B
- assets/sample_weibull.json 177 B
- metadata.json 620 B
- README.md 4.7 KB
- references/cheatsheet.md 5.1 KB
- scripts/monte_carlo.py 38 KB runs code
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 114 lines · 122 tokens per session scan A 39b08b27ed8b
monte-carlo-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (66 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 122 tokens to every session and 1,320 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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