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-buildergit 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-builder)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/hve-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/hve-builder/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-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/hve-builder.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 | $0.00054 | $0.01734 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00694 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00347 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00173 |
Grade A, and why
hve-builder 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 — 88 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
HVE Builder Skill
Goal
Deliver a usable prompt, instruction, agent, subagent, or skill that meets the requirements catalog, or a credible read-only report, with the fewest lifecycle turns that preserve an independent review pass and final-state evidence.
Read references/workflow-contract.md first; it owns mode routing, candidate convergence, the review pass, and overall outcomes. Apply references/requirements-catalog.md as the quality standard. The References section maps the remaining on-demand references.
Use Cases
- Create a new artifact from a stated need, choosing the type by responsibility and activation through references/artifact-types.md.
- Turn an existing draft, prompt, or ad hoc instruction set into an artifact that meets the catalog, preserving its contract unless the caller asks for a change.
- Clean up an existing artifact by keeping required guidance, clarifying incomplete rules, consolidating duplication, and retiring obsolete instructions. Use the catalog's maintenance decisions to distinguish behavior-preserving refactoring from an approved replacement or removal.
- Review instruction quality without changing source, or validate mechanical conformance without claiming an instruction-quality verdict.
- Extend an HVE workflow with project-specific capability. For example, a team that wants
rpi-researchandrpi-planto use an internal corpus needs a skill that tells those workflows how to gather, index, and cite that corpus, or a research subagent that gathers source pointers in isolated context and returns them as suggestions. Choose between them by whether the work needs its own context, and author against the target workflow's discovery contract in references/extending-hve-builder.md; for an RPI phase, the artifact description is the contract the phase follows. - Author a host extension (instruction, skill, or subagent) that hve-builder itself discovers in a downstream repository.
What ships with it
6 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.
- 1mo ago Changed · -3 lines · -3 tokens per session 954fc5700296
- 1mo ago Changed · -16 tokens per session 8ddc12996390
- 1mo ago Changed · -8 lines · +46 tokens per session c715c755b394
- 1mo ago First seen · 99 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A e4dd0462fad8
hve-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,582 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 1,734 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 2026-08-30.
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