Microsoft Discovery is an extensible platform for scientific research and research-and-development workflows that combines agent orchestration, reasoning, graph-based knowledge, and high-performance computing. Researchers, partners, and product users use its Azure enterprise platform or local Windows app to explore and build research workflows. The catalogue entries provide skills and instructions for working with the Discovery community and platform.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/discovery. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/discovery/main/.github/skills/discovery-catalog/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/discoveryWrote 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/discovery/discovery-catalog)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/discovery/discovery-catalog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/discovery/discovery-catalog/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/discovery/discovery-catalog"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/discovery/discovery-catalog.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to low
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- low Excessive Agency · line 53 Skill's behavior or capabilities extend beyond its stated purpose. Scope creep allows an agent to perform actions unrelated to its documented functionality, increasing the attack surface.Fix: Limit the skill's scope to its documented purpose. Remove instructions that enable the agent to perform actions outside its stated functionality.
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 | $0.03340 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00049 | $0.01336 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.00668 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00334 |
Grade A, and why
discovery-catalog 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 1mo 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 — 286 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Discovery Catalog
Compatibility
This skill is read-only and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux through PowerShell. PowerShell 7+ (pwsh) is recommended for consistent table rendering, though the dispatcher also works in Windows PowerShell 5.1 with less polished wrapping.
Overview
Read-only inventory of the Discovery catalog repo. One dispatcher script (scripts/discovery-catalog.ps1) supports list and item-inspection invocations:
| Invocation | What it lists |
|---|---|
discovery-catalog publishers |
Every publisher across agents/ and starter-kits/, with per-publisher agent and starter-kit counts |
discovery-catalog agents |
Every agent in the catalog (one row per agent folder name) |
discovery-catalog agents list-tools |
Every agent plus the tools shipped under each agent's tools/ folder |
discovery-catalog starter-kits |
Every starter kit (one row per kit folder name) |
discovery-catalog <agent-name> describe |
One agent with Name, Publisher, Version, HasTool, Description |
discovery-catalog <starterkit-name> describe |
One starter kit with Name, Publisher, Version, Category, AgentCount, Description |
discovery-catalog <agent-name> list-tools |
One agent with Agent, Publisher, Version, ToolCount, Tools, Description |
Repo layout the script handles
The catalog uses a flat layout — one folder per agent or starter kit directly under the parent directory:
| Asset | Path pattern | Display |
|---|---|---|
| Agent | agents/<agent-name>/ |
<agent-name> |
| Starter kit | starter-kits/<kit-name>/ |
<kit-name> |
| Tool under an agent | agents/<agent>/tools/<tool-name>/ |
<tool-name> |
Inclusion rules:
- An "agent" is any folder containing an
agent.yaml. - A "starter kit" is any folder containing a
kit.json. - Folders without those files (shared helpers, README-only directories) are silently skipped.
- The
agents/tmp/scratch directory used by the deployer skills is always skipped.
Publisher and party come from the asset's metadata, not from the folder location:
What ships with it
1 file 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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 286 lines · 122 tokens per session scan A bcec53c1279b
discovery-catalog is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/discovery (267 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 122 tokens to every session and 3,340 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 2026-08-30.
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