squad-help

squad-help is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from microsoft/Generative-AI-for-beginners-dotnet. It costs 60 tokens per session (1,043 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of squad-help, MIT.

A guide for using Squad, a custom Copilot agent that assembles a team of specialists for work in a repository.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when setting up a team, finding Squad commands, or initializing Squad in a new project.
Why use it?
It prevents confusion between an agent, a skill, and a command, so Squad is invoked through the correct mechanism.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

About the project

Generative AI for Beginners .NET is a hands-on course that teaches .NET developers to build applications using generative AI models and related tools. Its lessons use practical samples covering scenarios such as chat, audio transcription, agents, and local AI. The catalogue entries are add-ons associated with the course repository.

microsoft/Generative-AI-for-beginners-dotnet · 3,047 stars · on GitHub · aka.ms

Install

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners-dotnet/squad-help
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/Generative-AI-for-beginners-dotnet --skill squad-help
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/Generative-AI-for-beginners-dotnet

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for squad-help

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners-dotnet/squad-help.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners-dotnet/squad-help)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners-dotnet/squad-help"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/generative-ai-for-beginners-dotnet/squad-help.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,043 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00060 $0.01043
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00522
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00209
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00104

Measured 6d ago against content hash d2696395847e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

squad-help 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 6d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to squad-help — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.github/skills/squad-help/SKILL.md · 98 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 98 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: squad-help

Quick reference. If you're reading this because a user said "use squad" or "squad" or "set up a squad", you're in the right place — read on for the correct invocation paths.


Squad is a custom agent, not a skill

The Squad framework registers a custom Copilot CLI agent at .github/agents/squad.agent.md. The agent is named Squad and its description is "Your AI team. Describe what you're building, get a team of specialists that live in your repo."

Copilot CLI agents and skills are different things:

Thing How to invoke Example
Skill skill(name) tool call or natural-language match skill(squad-commands)
Agent task tool with agent_type=<name> task(name="...", agent_type="Squad", prompt="...")
Slash command Built-in CLI keyword /agent, /skills, /mcp

Calling skill(Squad) will fail with "Skill not found: Squad" because Squad is the agent, not a skill. (/squad as a slash command also does not exist — only built-in CLI keywords like /agent, /skills, /mcp are slash commands. There's no way to map a skill name to a slash command without a Copilot CLI feature change.)


How to actually use Squad

Pick the path that matches the user's intent:

A) Invoke the Squad coordinator agent (most common)

The Squad coordinator orchestrates a team of specialists. It routes work to the right agent, scaffolds a team if none exists, and enforces handoffs.

task(
  name="<short-task-name>",
  agent_type="Squad",
  prompt="<what you want the team to do>"
)

Use this when the user says things like:

  • "Use Squad to build X"
  • "Set up an AI team for this project"
  • "Have the Squad coordinator design Y"
  • "Spawn Squad" / "Squad, help me with ..."

B) See what Squad commands exist

The squad-commands skill is a categorized catalog of common Squad operations. The coordinator presents it as an interactive menu.

Trigger by natural-language match: "squad commands", "what can squad do", "show me squad options", "slash commands", "what commands are available".

Read the full file on GitHub · 98 lines

Changes

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.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 98 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A d2696395847e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

squad-help is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/Generative-AI-for-beginners-dotnet (3,047 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 1,043 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to squad-help, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.