Tag: agent-skills

Use Cursor's /goal command to keep a cloud agent working toward one finish line across many turns. Covers writing a verifiable objective, pinning a Custom Mode playbook, pairing it with /loop and subscriptions, the CLI's durable goals, and how to stop a goal that ignores Stop.

A skill's body loads on demand, but its name and description sit in a listing that is always in the prompt, capped at 1% of the context window. Claude Code 2.1.261 adds /skill-doctor to say which loaded skills never get used and what each one costs, so you can prune them before the budget starts evicting the skills you do use.

Instructions files are deterministic and always sent. AGENTS.md sits at the bottom of the documented repository precedence list. Copilot Memory is a separate store Copilot writes for itself, read by only three surfaces, and it is not in the precedence list at all. Here is the support matrix and the rule for deciding where each convention belongs.

Agent Plugins 1.0.0 standardizes exactly two component types: skills and MCP servers. Slash commands, hooks, subagents, rules, LSP servers, permission config and secrets all stay vendor-specific. Here is the field-by-field matrix across Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot and Codex, and which layout to author in.

Stop shipping SKILL.md folders inside every agent deployment. Serve them from an MCP server and pull them with UseMcpSkills on Microsoft.Agents.AI.Mcp 1.18. Includes the exact skill://index.json shape, a working C# server, the wire trace, and the SEP-2640 drift that will bite you.

Agent Plugins 1.0 says plugin.json at the root and mcp.json beside it. Claude Code 2.1.x wants .claude-plugin/plugin.json and .mcp.json. Here is what each client actually loads, tested against a real plugin, and the dual-layout directory that satisfies both.

Cursor did not delete rules. It split them. This checklist sorts a .cursorrules file and a folder of .mdc rules into the four things they should be in Cursor 3.11: an AGENTS.md, a small set of surviving rules, skills, and subagents, then bundles the result as a plugin.

Visual Studio 2026 18.8 puts expert-authored .NET and Azure agent skills in the tool picker under a Built-in category, disabled by default. The default is the interesting part.

On 2026-07-31 Microsoft shipped a polyglot unit-test agent in dotnet/skills. The interesting part is the mandatory pre-completion gate that pseudo-mutates your assertions before the agent is allowed to say it is done.

Agent skills and MCP servers in GitHub Copilot code review went GA on 2026-07-29. Here is where the files live, why skills load from the head branch, and why every MCP tool call in a review is read-only.