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/policy-and-managed-settings/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/policy-and-managed-settings)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/policy-and-managed-settings"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/policy-and-managed-settings/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/policy-and-managed-settings"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/policy-and-managed-settings.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 | $0.00112 | $0.00943 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00045 | $0.00377 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00022 | $0.00189 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00011 | $0.00094 |
Grade A, and why
policy-and-managed-settings 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 — 66 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Adding an Enterprise Policy
Choose the policy destination by where the governed behavior is implemented, not by which team requested it. Most controls for Copilot agent behavior belong in the SDK/runtime rather than VS Code.
flowchart TD
A[Enterprise control] --> P{Existing permission policy<br/>introduced before VS Code 1.133.0?}
P -->|Yes| L[Pre-1.133 compatibility migration]
P -->|No| B{Where is the governed behavior implemented?}
B -->|Copilot runtime, tools, MCP,<br/>sandbox, or agent loop| R[SDK/runtime managed setting]
B -->|VS Code editor or workbench| V[VS Code configuration policy]
B -->|Extension-provided setting| E[Extension policy]
B -->|Independent runtime and editor behavior| M[Split runtime/editor control]
Follow the matching guide:
- SDK/runtime managed setting
- VS Code configuration policy
- Extension-provided setting
- Split runtime/editor control
- Pre-1.133 permission-policy migration
- Agent Host policy support and migration readiness
Use the support-maintenance guide when changing policy classifications, applied-requirement predicates, or admin migration-readiness diagnostics. It applies when reviewing an existing control as well as when adding a new one.
General rules:
- Runtime enforcement is authoritative for behavior executed inside the runtime.
- Do not duplicate a runtime parser, matcher, or security decision in VS Code.
- A VS Code policy is appropriate only for editor/workbench-owned behavior.
- New Copilot enterprise controls should target the shared managed-settings/SDK model.
- The VS Code settings-to-managed-settings bridge is a compatibility path for legacy settings only. Do not add a new VS Code setting in order to bridge it; define new runtime-owned controls directly in the managed-settings/SDK contract. The bridge itself is unconditional; do not reintroduce a compatibility gate for it.
- Run
npm run export-policy-datafor every VS Code or extension policy change. Never editbuild/lib/policies/policyData.jsoncmanually.
What ships with it
8 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.
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 · +6 lines 5ae3aac4f8cd
- 10d ago Changed · -2 lines 90f9c469cc90
- 20d ago Changed · +5 lines 05b6d6905c33
- 1mo ago Changed · -12 lines 9c7d332836b2
- 1mo ago First seen · 69 lines · 112 tokens per session scan A 38a1fdae1eb4
policy-and-managed-settings is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (194,219 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 112 tokens to every session and 943 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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