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/experiments/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/experiments)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/experiments"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/experiments/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/experiments"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/experiments.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00054 | $0.00982 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00393 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00196 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00098 |
Grade A, and why
experiments 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 19d 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 — 68 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Experiments
Controlling behavior
- Experiment-controlled setting: add
experiment: { mode: 'auto' }to the setting's schema, ormode: 'startup'to only pick up changed assignments on startup. ExP then sets the setting's default through the treatmentconfig.<setting id>(orexperiment.name), and code reads the setting withIConfigurationServiceas usual. Values that users set themselves still win. Use this when users could reasonably choose the behavior themselves. - Treatment: read a value with
IWorkbenchAssignmentService.getTreatment<T>(name). It resolves toundefinedwithout an assignment, so keep a fallback, and read it again ononDidRefetchAssignments. Use this for values that are not user preferences, such as copy or variant names.
To try an assignment locally, set experiments.override.<treatment name> in your user settings, for example "experiments.override.config.chat.mySetting.enabled": true.
Trigger events for triggered scorecards
A triggered scorecard only compares users who reached the moment where control and treatment behave differently, so users that the experiment never affected don't dilute the result. Log that moment with the helpers in experimentTrigger.ts:
logSettingExperimentTrigger(telemetryService, MY_SETTING_ID); // experiment-controlled setting
logExperimentTrigger(telemetryService, 'myTreatment'); // treatment
They log the shared experimentTrigger event with the treatment name as treatmentName, at most once per window or process, so they can run on every evaluation. Base the scorecard's trigger on that event (monacoworkbench/experimentTrigger) and its treatmentName. Don't add feature-specific trigger events.
When to use one
Use a trigger when only some assigned users are affected, at an identifiable moment: an action, a surface that only appears in some situations, or a code path that only some sessions reach. Don't use one when:
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.
- 19d ago First seen · 68 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 725bacfce279
experiments is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (193,657 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 982 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 2026-09-27.
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