Visual Studio Code is a code editor that supports editing, navigating, understanding, debugging, and extending software projects. Developers use it for the edit-build-debug cycle, and the catalogue add-ons provide skills, instructions, and agents for working within the editor.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/vscode. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/vscode/main/.github/skills/design-philosophy/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/vscodeWrote 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/vscode/design-philosophy)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/design-philosophy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/design-philosophy/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/vscode/design-philosophy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/design-philosophy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- Snyk pass
- 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 | $0.00086 | $0.06609 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00034 | $0.02644 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00017 | $0.01322 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00661 |
Grade A, and why
design-philosophy 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 — 343 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
VS Code Design Philosophy
This skill is the canonical VS Code design philosophy — the single source of truth for how we reason about UI, for both developers and agents.
As more and more of the UI is implemented via agents and tooling, the pixels increasingly take care of themselves, and the scarce, human part becomes the design judgment behind them.
This is about shifting left - talking about UI in design terms, not pixels, and having that conversation early. When something looks off, "this is 8px, should be 6px" fixes one number; "this surface is rounded at the wrong elevation tier" names the rule, so the fix lands everywhere and we catch it on a mockup or screenshot rather than in code review. The aim is to agree on what the UI should be and why, in language a designer and an engineer can share - the implementation (which token, which file) tends to follow once the design is settled.
How to read this: three layers
The hardest part of any design language is getting from "this feels off" to a clear, shared fix everyone agrees on. This bridges that in three steps, each explaining the one below it:
| Layer | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Values | what we want people to feel, and why it's at stake | Focused |
| Principles | evaluative rules you can hold a design up against, phrased as a question | "One thing leads; the rest supports" - where does the eye go first? |
| Moves | the concrete mechanics, each with a rule for which one and why | demote the secondary panel to a recessed background token / a quieter type role |
Read top-down when you're learning the system, and bottom-up when you're fixing a bug: name the feeling, find the principle it breaks, then reach for the move that restores it.
Worked example - a busy panel
- See: a panel feels busy and keeps pulling your eye off the editor.
- Feeling: not Calm, not Focused.
- Principle: breaks Quiet at rest (it carries a permanent fill it shouldn't) and One thing leads (secondary chrome competing with the editor).
- Move: drop the panel to a recessed/transparent background token, reveal its border only on hover, and demote its labels to a quieter type role.
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 · +18 lines 87b7b112e718
- 10d ago Changed · -6 lines e891dec5161a
- 1mo ago Changed · -150 lines 9a79cd71e4b7
- 1mo ago First seen · 481 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A 3ba0cac231a7
design-philosophy is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (194,219 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 6,609 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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