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 agentmods add skills/microsoft/hve-core/prompt-buildernpx skills add microsoft/hve-core --skill prompt-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/prompt-builder)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/hve-core/prompt-builder"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/hve-core/prompt-builder.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00022 | $0.00489 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00244 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00004 | $0.00098 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00049 |
Grade A, and why
prompt-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 4d 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.
Prompt Builder Compatibility Skill
Goal
Preserve legacy prompt-builder activation while routing all source changes, review, behavior testing, validation, and outcome resolution through the hve-builder skill.
Flow
- Translate
promptFilestotargets. Treatfilesas reference context unless the caller explicitly includes them in the write boundary. - Resolve
createwhen an approved target is missing andimprovewhen targets already exist. Route explicit cleanup to theprompt-refactorcompatibility skill and read-only analysis toprompt-analyze. - Activate
hve-builderwith the targets, selected mode, requirements, reference context, and any caller-owned evidence root. - Return the
hve-builderfinal response without adding a second author, test, or evaluation loop.
Inputs
promptFiles: target prompt-engineering artifacts; defaults to current open or attached filesfiles: reference artifacts used to derive requirementsrequirements: explicit objectives, constraints, and acceptance criteriaevidenceRoot: optional caller-owned HVE Builder evidence path
Success Criteria
- Legacy inputs map to an explicit HVE Builder target set and write boundary.
hve-buildercompletes every required gate for the selected mode.- The returned overall outcome is unchanged from
hve-builder.
Constraints
- Do not dispatch retired named lifecycle workers.
- Do not maintain a second sandbox, status vocabulary, or quality rubric.
- Do not treat reference files as write targets without explicit approval.
Stop Rules
- Stop when
hve-builderreturns Pass, Revise, Deferred, or Blocked. - Ask only when target identity or write authority cannot be inferred safely.
Handoff
Use prompt-analyze for a legacy read-only request and prompt-refactor for a legacy behavior-preserving cleanup request. Both route back to hve-builder.
Final Response Contract
Return the mode, targets, changed files, static verdict, behavior-test fidelity and verdict, validation result, overall outcome, evidence links, and next action.
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.
- 4d ago First seen · 53 lines · 22 tokens per session scan A 2983b67a0b93
prompt-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/hve-core (1,426 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 22 tokens to every session and 489 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
brainstorming
You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.
auto-perf-optimize
Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.
chat-perf
Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
cpu-profile-analysis
Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…