HVE Core is a collection of agents, prompts, coding instructions, and skills for building repeatable software-development workflows with GitHub Copilot. It is intended for individuals and teams that want structured AI-assisted research, planning, implementation, and review, while the catalogue entries provide many of its reusable workflow components.
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/hve-core --skill hve-artifact-authoringgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/hve-coreWrote 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/hve-core/hve-artifact-authoring)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/hve-artifact-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/hve-artifact-authoring/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/hve-core/hve-artifact-authoring"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/hve-artifact-authoring.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 | $0.00052 | $0.01551 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00620 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00310 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00155 |
Grade A, and why
hve-artifact-authoring 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 yesterday.
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 — 156 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
HVE Artifact Authoring
Goal
Create agents, instructions, and skills that follow HVE Core's current authoring,
distribution, documentation, and validation contracts. Use the hve-builder skill when the work
requires lifecycle-managed authoring, a review pass, or host validation.
Artifact Selection
Choose each artifact from its responsibility and activation model.
| Artifact | Responsibility | Activation |
|---|---|---|
Agent (.agent.md) |
User-selected workflow or isolated subagent work | Agent picker or parent dispatch |
Instruction (.instructions.md) |
Conventions applied to matching paths | applyTo glob |
Skill (SKILL.md) |
Reusable workflow, domain knowledge, references, or utilities | Semantic match or slash invocation |
Keep reusable behavior in a skill. The Copilot harness does not load prompt files (.prompt.md),
so build a parameterized entry point as a user-invocable skill: its slash command takes the
prompt's place, argument-hint shows its arguments, and the body names each input. Add a thin
agent only when it provides a distinct entry point. Delegate isolated work only when the dispatch
cost is justified.
Flow
- Identify the artifact responsibility, activation path, package ID, targets, requirements, success criteria, constraints, and stop rules.
- Search for an existing artifact that can be reused or extended before creating another one.
- Select the matching bundled starter asset when the caller wants a new artifact:
assets/agent-template.mdassets/instruction-template.mdassets/skill-template.md
- Replace every placeholder and remove unused optional fields. Do not copy a starter unchanged.
- Write the artifact outcome-first. State the goal, scored success criteria, constraints, stop rules, workflow, and response contract. Add delegation and tracking only when needed.
- When a skill ships scripts, classify it against the triggers in the
skill-security-modelinstructions ("When a Model Is Required"). If a trigger applies, or the change is significant under "Keeping a Model Current", create or update the skill'sSECURITY.md, its security registry row, or its classification entry in the same change. When those instructions are unavailable, skip this step and say so rather than failing the authoring task. - Synchronize current distribution and documentation projections.
- Run the checks owned by the changed artifact type and record evidence.
What ships with it
4 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.
- yesterday Changed · +6 lines · -2 tokens per session 2477fcc9b7e5
- 1mo ago Changed · +5 lines 621d2556c075
- 1mo ago Changed 4f1d45d0e2b0
- 2mo ago First seen · 145 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 33b3f55fb0ea
hve-artifact-authoring is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,606 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 1,551 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-05.
hve-artifact-authoring compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hve-artifact-authoringmicrosoft/hve-core | Skill | 1.6k | today | MIT | A | 52 | Claude Code |
| 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 |