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 research-project-briefgit 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/research-project-brief)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/research-project-brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/research-project-brief/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/research-project-brief"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/research-project-brief.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 | $0.00122 | $0.01182 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00049 | $0.00473 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.00236 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00118 |
Grade A, and why
research-project-brief 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 — 108 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Research Project Brief
Overview
Keeps a research project's working state in one reviewable brief: what the literature base is, what methods were chosen and why, what collaborators decided or disagreed on, what milestones are next, and which sources have gone stale.
When to Use
- A faculty or research user wants their project brief refreshed before a meeting or milestone
- The user asks what was decided, what is contested, or what is blocking progress
- Collaborator input across mail, Teams, and files needs consolidating into project state
When NOT to Use
- A public-web literature review with external citations — use deep-research
- Accreditation or grant evidence ledgers — use evidence-package-for-education
- Authoring the manuscript itself
Shared Skill Contract
This skill follows the institution's shared contract for every run:
- Intent check — confirm outcome, audience, timeframe, and format before working.
- Source plan — show the sources selected, their date ranges, access gaps, and freshness.
- Clarification gate — ask only for missing information that would change the result.
- Staged execution — keep discovery, synthesis, creation, review, and finalization separate.
- Reviewable output — separate facts, interpretation, recommendations, assumptions, and open questions.
- Human approval — require confirmation before sending, publishing, or changing any record.
- Reusable state — carry accepted decisions forward without silently reusing stale assumptions.
- Quality check — run the checks below before presenting final output.
- Telemetry — log workflow signals only; never sensitive content.
- Failure behavior — explain missing access, unsupported sources, uncertainty, and partial completion.
Core Instructions
Step 1: Identify the project
Confirm the project by name and its collaborators (SearchPeople). Load the prior brief if one exists and note its date.
Step 2: Assemble the source plan
List the sources before gathering: project files (SearchDrive), collaborator mail and chats (SearchM365, ListMessages), project meetings (ListCalendarView, transcripts), and the milestone calendar. State date ranges and access gaps.
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 · 108 lines · 122 tokens per session scan A b30ee429b23f
research-project-brief is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (101 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 122 tokens to every session and 1,182 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.
research-project-brief compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| research-project-briefmicrosoft/cat-agent-skills | Skill | 101 | yesterday | MIT | A | 122 | 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 |