copilot-skill-builder

A guide for creating and maintaining Agent Skills: folders of instructions, optional scripts, examples, and reference material that teach AI coding agents how to handle specialized work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to scaffold project or personal skills, write SKILL.md files, organize supporting resources, and maintain existing skills.
Why use it?
It explains the required file structure and metadata, helping skills work across VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and compatible agents.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trsdn/github-copilot-agent/copilot-skill-builder
Any agent
npx skills add trsdn/github-copilot-agent --skill copilot-skill-builder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trsdn/github-copilot-agent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 58 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,418 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00058 $0.01418
Opus 5 $0.00029 $0.00709
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00284
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00142

Measured yesterday against content hash 470918c3b114, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

copilot-skill-builder 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.

.github/skills/copilot-skill-builder/SKILL.md · 165 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 165 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill Builder

This skill helps you create, organize, and maintain Agent Skills for GitHub Copilot and compatible AI agents.

What are Agent Skills?

Agent Skills are folders containing a SKILL.md file plus optional scripts, examples, and resources. They teach specialized capabilities and workflows to AI agents. Skills are:

  • Portable: Work across VS Code, Copilot CLI, and Copilot coding agent
  • Composable: Multiple skills can work together
  • Efficient: Loaded on-demand based on relevance to the current task
  • Open standard: Based on agentskills.io

Skill locations

Type Location Use case
Project skills .github/skills/<skill-name>/ Shared with the repository
Personal skills ~/.copilot/skills/<skill-name>/ Private to your machine

SKILL.md file format

Every skill requires a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: skill-name
description: Description of what the skill does and when to use it (max 1024 chars)
---

# Skill Instructions

Detailed instructions, guidelines, and examples...

Frontmatter fields

Field Required Description
name Yes Unique identifier. Lowercase, hyphens for spaces, max 64 chars. Must match parent directory name
description Yes What the skill does and when to use it. Be specific to help Copilot decide when to load. Max 1024 chars
argument-hint No Hint text shown in chat input when invoked as a slash command
user-invocable No Controls / slash command visibility (default: true). Set to false for background skills
disable-model-invocation No Controls auto-loading by Copilot (default: false). Set to true for manual-only skills
license No License name or reference to a bundled license file (from agentskills.io spec)
compatibility No Environment requirements — intended product, system packages, network access. Max 500 chars
metadata No Arbitrary key-value mapping for additional metadata (e.g., author, version)
allowed-tools No Space-delimited list of pre-approved tools the skill may use (experimental)

Read the full file on GitHub · 165 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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.

  1. yesterday First seen · 165 lines · 58 tokens per session scan A 470918c3b114

Subscribe to this mod's changes

copilot-skill-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository trsdn/github-copilot-agent (3 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 58 tokens to every session and 1,418 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 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 2026-08-31.

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