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/update-instructions/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/update-instructions)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/vscode/update-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/update-instructions/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/update-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/vscode/update-instructions.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 | $0.00007 | $0.00220 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00088 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00001 | $0.00044 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00001 | $0.00022 |
Grade A, and why
update-instructions 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 27d 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.
What it actually says
Read the changes introduced on the current branch, including BOTH:
- Uncommitted workspace modifications (staged and unstaged)
- Committed changes that are on the current HEAD but not yet in the default upstream branch (e.g.
origin/main)
Guidance:
- First, capture uncommitted diffs (equivalent of
git diffandgit diff --cached). - Then, determine the merge base with the default branch (assume
origin/mainunless configured otherwise) usinggit merge-base HEAD origin/mainand diff (git diff <merge-base>...HEAD) to include committed-but-unpushed work.
After understanding all of these changes, read every instruction file under .github/instructions and assess whether any instruction is invalidated. If so, propose minimal, necessary wording updates. If no updates are needed, respond exactly with: No updates needed.
Be concise and conservative: only suggest changes that are absolutely necessary.
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.
- 27d ago First seen · 19 lines · 7 tokens per session scan A 4eb1ad3c1333
update-instructions is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode (193,657 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 7 tokens to every session and 220 once invoked, about $0.0000 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 2026-09-19.
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