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 tool-tracergit 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/tool-tracer)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/tool-tracer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/cat-agent-skills/tool-tracer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 | $0.00085 | $0.01691 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00043 | $0.00846 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00338 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00169 |
Grade A, and why
tool-tracer 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 4d 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.
Skill: tool-tracer
Purpose
Runs any user task normally, then produces a structured JSON run summary (tool_trace.json) capturing every tool, action, connector, knowledge query, and sub-skill call made during the run — inputs, outputs, error codes, retries, and sequence. Built as an admin / debug tool: on a live channel a normal user never sees what the agent did behind the scenes, so this lets a maker or admin see it and triage an interaction without reproducing it in the test pane.
Trigger
This skill activates only when the user's message contains the exact debug command:
/special-debug tool-trace
The command may be followed by (or precede) the task to run — e.g. /special-debug tool-trace look up order 4471 and email the customer. If the command is present, run the task and produce the trace; if it is not present, this skill does not apply — even for casual phrasings like "trace this", "log this run", "debug this", or "what did you just do". Requiring the explicit command keeps a trace a deliberate act, not something a channel user triggers by accident.
Two capture modes. By default the trace runs in redacted mode — values that look like secrets, tokens, credentials, or PII/PHI are masked so the trace is safe to share for triage while still showing what ran. An authorized admin can append --full (/special-debug tool-trace --full …) to capture every value verbatim for deep debugging. Restrict who can use --full at deployment — a skill can't enforce it.
Scope & sensitivity. This is an admin / debug tool. In the default redacted mode, values that look like secrets, tokens, credentials, or PII/PHI are masked (e.g.
"<redacted:token>") so the trace shows what ran without leaking sensitive data. In--fullmode nothing is masked, sotool_trace.jsoncan contain secrets, tokens, or PHI verbatim. A skill cannot enforce access control; the maker deploying this is responsible for restricting--full(and the agent) to authorized admin/maker users and for handling the file within that trust boundary. Prefer not to expose--fullon agents published to untrusted end-user channels.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 108 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A 0f8211b8457f
tool-tracer is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/cat-agent-skills (64 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 1,691 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-09-03.
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