Skills for Copilot Studio is a plugin for authoring, testing, and troubleshooting standard Microsoft Copilot Studio agents as YAML files from a terminal or editor. It is intended for users of Claude Code, GitHub Copilot CLI, and VS Code who work with Copilot Studio agents. The catalogue add-ons are the plugin's skills, agents, hook, and plugin definition.
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/skills-for-copilot-studio --skill add-global-variablegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/skills-for-copilot-studioWrote 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/skills-for-copilot-studio/add-global-variable)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/skills-for-copilot-studio/add-global-variable"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/skills-for-copilot-studio/add-global-variable.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 5.1 | $0.00037 | $0.00957 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00018 | $0.00478 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00007 | $0.00191 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00096 |
Grade A, and why
add-global-variable 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 7d 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 — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Add Global Variable
Create a global variable that persists across all topics within a conversation.
Instructions
-
Auto-discover the agent directory:
Glob: **/agent.mcs.ymlUse the top-level agent. NEVER hardcode an agent name.
-
Read
settings.mcs.ymlto get theschemaNameprefix:Read: <agent-dir>/settings.mcs.ymlExtract the root-level
schemaNamevalue (e.g.,copilots_header_cre3c_fullagent). -
Determine from the user:
- Variable name (PascalCase, e.g.,
LastDiscussedCity) - Description of what it stores
- Whether the AI orchestrator should be aware of it (
aIVisibility) - Default value (if any)
- DO NOT skip any of these properties. If the user doesn't provide them, ask follow-up questions to get the necessary information.
- Variable name (PascalCase, e.g.,
-
Create the variable file at
<agent-dir>/variables/<VariableName>.mcs.yml:
# Name: <Human-readable Name>
# <Description>
name: <VariableName>
aIVisibility: <UseInAIContext or HideFromAIContext>
scope: Conversation
description: <Description of what the variable stores>
schemaName: <prefix>.globalvariable.<VariableName>
kind: GlobalVariableComponent
defaultValue: <DEFAULT or specific value>
- Key fields explained:
name— PascalCase identifier. This is how topics reference the variable:Global.<name>(e.g.,Global.LastDiscussedCity).aIVisibility— Controls orchestrator awareness:UseInAIContext— The orchestrator can read and reason about this variable. Use when the variable influences routing or response generation (e.g., user preferences, conversation state the AI should track).HideFromAIContext— The variable exists but the orchestrator doesn't see it. Use for internal bookkeeping (e.g., counters, flags) that topics use but the AI doesn't need to reason about.
scope: Conversation— AlwaysConversationfor global variables (persists for the session).schemaName— Must follow the pattern<agent-schemaName>.globalvariable.<VariableName>. Read the prefix fromsettings.mcs.yml.defaultValue— Initial value. UseDEFAULTif no specific initial value is needed.
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.
- 7d ago First seen · 89 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 6ef9dd5d76f7
add-global-variable is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/skills-for-copilot-studio (430 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 957 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.
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