A development tool for launching Code OSS, the open-source version of VS Code built from source, in an isolated temporary profile. It supports driving the editor with Playwright and attaching a Node debugger.

It helps test VS Code workbench, chat, and agent flows; automate the interface; and debug the renderer, extension host, or main process.

It makes repeatable testing and debugging possible without mixing temporary work with another editor profile or causing port conflicts.

How microsoft/vscode configures Claude Code and Codex

About the project

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.

microsoft/vscode · 194,219 stars · on GitHub · code.visualstudio.com

Reuse

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.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/vscode/main/.agents/skills/launch/SKILL.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/launch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/launch)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/launch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/launch/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/launch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/launch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 96 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 8,661 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan C 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 41 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

high Privilege Escalation · line 70
Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.

Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
high Privilege Escalation · line 297
Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.

Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
high Privilege Escalation · line 305
Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.

Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 32
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 166
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 168
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 175
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 176
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 177
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 187
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 188
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 189
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 192
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 213
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 219
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 243
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 245
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 270
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 271
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]
medium MCP Rug Pull · line 272
npx commands without a version suffix (e.g. @1.0.0) create a rug-pull risk if the upstream server is compromised and publishes a malicious update.

Fix: Pin the version: npx @scope/[email protected]

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

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	$0.00096	$0.08661
Opus 5.5	$0.00038	$0.03464
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00019	$0.01732
Haiku 4.5	$0.00010	$0.00866

Measured 7d ago against content hash 9e3c9a64101d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

launch scanned grade C with 1 finding 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 12 executable files (playwrightScripts/focus-chat-input.ts, scripts/bootstrap/bootstrap-profile.ps1, scripts/bootstrap/bootstrap-profile.sh, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

rm -rf "$(dirname "$LOG")"

.agents/skills/launch/SKILL.md · 486 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 486 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Code OSS Dev - Launch + Debug

You're working on VS Code itself and you want to:

Launch a Code OSS build from sources that is already signed in (Copilot, GitHub, etc.) so chat / agent flows work end-to-end.
Drive it with @playwright/cli over CDP (UI automation).
Optionally attach a debugger via dap-cli to set breakpoints in the renderer, extension host, or main process.
Run multiple instances at once without port conflicts.

This skill provides a launcher that clones an authenticated user-data-dir to a throwaway temp folder, picks free ports for every debug surface, and prints them as JSON so you can pick them up programmatically.

The clone is slim: workspace storage, browser caches, file history, cached VSIX backups, and old logs are excluded by default. On macOS, auth tokens live in the OS keychain plus small files inside User/globalStorage - both of which are preserved. On Windows the GitHub session lives in the shared-data-dir instead, which the launcher seeds separately (see Windows authentication).

Prerequisites

macOS, Linux, or Windows.
- macOS / Linux: the launcher is a bash script (scripts/launch.sh) and depends on rsync, nohup, and Node on PATH.
- Windows: use scripts\launch.ps1 instead. It needs no extra tooling beyond Node on PATH, and works on both Windows PowerShell 5.1 and PowerShell 7+. Parse launcher output with ConvertFrom-Json. If Node is managed with fnm, put it on PATH first:
```
fnm env --use-on-cd --shell powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression
fnm use   # picks up the repo's .nvmrc
```
A VS Code checkout with node_modules/ installed (npm install if missing — do not symlink from a sibling worktree; that breaks builds in subtle ways).
A VS Code checkout with sources built. Run npm run compile once (one-shot) or npm run watch for incremental rebuilds. Both build the full client and all built-in extensions under extensions/. You must build the full product to run successfully, building just the client is not enough.
- The launcher compiles only when outputs are missing; it does not detect stale dependencies or out/ files. After pulling, switching branches, or changing dependency manifests, run npm install when needed and rebuild before launching.
An authenticated Code OSS profile is recommended but not required. By default the launcher tries to seed from ~/.vscode-oss-dev on macOS/Linux or $env:USERPROFILE\.vscode-oss-dev on Windows, which is the user-data-dir the repo's launch.json configs use. Only pass --source-user-data-dir <path> (or set $CODE_OSS_DEV_AUTHED_USER_DATA_DIR) when you specifically want to seed from a different profile (e.g. your regular ~/Library/Application Support/Code install). If the source profile is missing, the launcher continues with an empty isolated profile.
@playwright/cli available (it's a devDependency in the vscode repo - npm install then use npx @playwright/cli).
For debugger work: dap-cli on PATH. If debugger support would be useful but the dap-cli skill is not present, prompt the user to install it from https://github.com/roblourens/dap-cli.
CSS selectors are internal implementation details. If a selector-based eval stops working, take a fresh snapshot, inspect the current DOM, and update the selector rather than assuming an old one still applies.

Read the full file on GitHub · 486 lines

Files

What ships with it

12 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.

Changes

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 Changed · +6 lines 9e3c9a64101d
16d ago Changed · +1 lines 68bd3cf74595
22d ago Changed · +46 lines 98bbcefdb1ce
1mo ago Changed · +1 lines caacd3d01951
1mo ago Changed · -15 lines b5a0cc17a009
1mo ago Changed bf360d6f47a4
1mo ago Changed · +4 lines 5954311c6acb
1mo ago First seen · 443 lines · 96 tokens per session scan C d37ce8db747c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

launch is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (194,219 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 96 tokens to every session and 8,661 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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vscode: Skill for Claude Code