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/smoke-tests/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/smoke-tests)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/smoke-tests"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/smoke-tests/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/smoke-tests"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/smoke-tests.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 | $0.00050 | $0.03017 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00020 | $0.01207 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00603 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00302 |
Grade A, and why
smoke-tests 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 2d 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 — 166 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Running Smoke Tests
Smoke tests live in test/smoke/ and drive a full VS Code instance (Electron, web, or remote) through end-to-end user flows.
Scripts
npm run smoketest— compiles the smoke tests first (test/smoke), then runs them.npm run smoketest-no-compile— runs the already-compiled smoke tests. CI uses this after an explicit compile step.
Both forward extra arguments after -- to the runner (test/smoke/test/index.js).
Common options
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
-g <pattern> (alias -f) |
Grep filter on test/suite titles (mocha grep). |
--build <path> |
Run against a packaged build instead of the compiled-from-source dev build. |
--tracing |
Capture Playwright traces (and screenshots on failure). |
--web |
Run the browser smoke tests instead of Electron. |
--headless |
Headless browser (used with --web). |
--remote |
Run the remote smoke tests. |
--shard <index>/<total> |
Run only one part of the top-level suites, for example --shard 1/2. Suites are balanced across shards by estimated duration (see test/smoke/src/shard.ts); each suite runs in exactly one shard. |
# Run everything (Electron, from source)
npm run smoketest
# Run only a subset of suites by name, with tracing (replace <suite name> with your suite, e.g. "Agents Window")
npm run smoketest -- -g "<suite name>" --tracing
# Run against a packaged build (CI style)
npm run smoketest-no-compile -- --tracing --build "/path/to/VSCode-darwin-arm64/Code - OSS.app"
The -g pattern matches against test/suite titles. For example, -g "Agents Window" matches all three Agents Window suites (Agents Window, Agents Window (local AgentHost), and Agents Window (local AgentHost, SDK sandbox)); use whatever substring identifies the suite(s) you care about.
The runner exits non-zero if any test fails, so a 0 exit code means every selected test passed.
Sharding in PR CI
The GitHub PR workflows split the Electron smoke tests with a matrix (shard: [1, 2]) on the <os>-electron-smoke-test-shards jobs in .github/workflows/pr.yml, which pass --shard to the runner. They report as <OS> (shard 1/2) / Electron-Smoke and <OS> (shard 2/2) / Electron-Smoke. A gate job, required-checks, reports the required <OS> / Electron-Smoke checks and fails a platform's check if any of its shards did not succeed. The shards are skipped, and the check passes, when the pull request only changes paths the smoke tests cannot read (see .github/actions/detect-changes/detect.ts). To change the shard count, edit the matrix list. Near the top of each shard's smoke-test-runner.log, a Running smoke test shard <index>/<total> line lists the suites that shard ran.
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.
- 2d ago Changed 5cee2d070239
- 4d ago Changed · +1 lines e7be82dce243
- 6d ago Changed · +14 lines 3ff226c9d31d
- 1mo ago First seen · 151 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A ed290f30a6dd
smoke-tests is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (194,219 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 50 tokens to every session and 3,017 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 2026-08-30.
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