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 mcsbgit 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/mcsb)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/mcsb"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/mcsb/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/mcsb"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/mcsb.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 | $0.00038 | $0.00918 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00367 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00184 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00092 |
Grade A, and why
mcsb 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 2mo 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 — 53 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark — Skill Entry
This SKILL.md is the entrypoint for the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmark (MCSB) skill.
The skill encodes the durable, structurally stable layer of MCSB — the control-domain taxonomy and a domain-grain crosswalk to NIST SP 800-53 and CIS Controls — so the Security Planner and Security Reviewer can map and assess Azure cloud resources against a consistent control vocabulary.
The skill deliberately does not embed the volatile layer of MCSB (per-Azure-service security baselines, per-service control IDs, Azure Policy mappings, and Defender for Cloud assessment specifics). That content changes on Microsoft's release cadence and is retrieved at runtime through the Researcher Subagent per references/lookup-playbook.md.
Version and stability
This skill targets MCSB v2, which Microsoft marks as preview and which supersedes MCSB v1. Content is version-pinned and retrieval-dated (2026-07-21). MCSB v2 replaces v1's Governance and Strategy (GS) domain with an Artificial Intelligence Security (AI) domain, and maps to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 and CIS Controls v8.1 (v1 mapped to Rev. 4 and CIS v8). Re-verify the taxonomy and mappings against the official source before relying on them for a compliance decision.
Normative references
- 00 Control Index
- 01 Network Security
- 02 Identity Management
- 03 Privileged Access
- 04 Data Protection
- 05 Asset Management
- 06 Logging and Threat Detection
- 07 Incident Response
- 08 Posture and Vulnerability Management
- 09 Endpoint Security
- 10 Backup and Recovery
- 11 DevOps Security
- 12 Artificial Intelligence Security
- Lookup Playbook — delegation guardrail for volatile per-service lookups.
What ships with it
14 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.
- references/00-control-index.md 6.3 KB
- references/01-network-security.md 2.2 KB
- references/02-identity-management.md 2.1 KB
- references/03-privileged-access.md 2.0 KB
- references/04-data-protection.md 1.9 KB
- references/05-asset-management.md 1.9 KB
- references/06-logging-threat-detection.md 2.0 KB
- references/07-incident-response.md 1.8 KB
- references/08-posture-vulnerability-management.md 1.9 KB
- references/09-endpoint-security.md 1.8 KB
- references/10-backup-recovery.md 1.8 KB
- references/11-devops-security.md 2.0 KB
- references/12-ai-security.md 2.3 KB
- references/lookup-playbook.md 2.4 KB
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.
- 2mo ago First seen · 53 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A c97941c720b4
mcsb is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,606 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 918 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 2026-09-03.
mcsb compared with skills from other repositories
| Mod | Type | Stars | Last push | Licence | Scan | Tokens | Works with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mcsbmicrosoft/hve-core | Skill | 1.6k | today | MIT | A | 38 | Claude Code |
| gke-compute-classesgoogle/skills | Skill | 24k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 83 | Claude Code, Codex |
| gke-reliabilitygoogle/skills | Skill | 24k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 85 | Claude Code, Codex |
| gke-workload-securitygoogle/skills | Skill | 24k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 171 | Claude Code, Codex |
| cloud-architectJeffallan/claude-skills | Skill | 12k | 9d ago | MIT | A | 71 | Claude Code |
| nemo-automodel-launcher-configNVIDIA/skills | Skill | 3.9k | yesterday | Apache-2.0 | A | 30 | Claude Code |
| azure-mgmt-botservice-dotnetmicrosoft/skills | Skill | 3.2k | 2d ago | MIT | A | 78 | Claude Code |