Integrate Agents with Skills in Github Copilot

 

The past year saw the rise of Agentic workflows. Agents have a task or goal to accomplish and build context, take actions using tools. Tools while affective in surfacing the requisite sources and actions can easily increase in numbers causing context bloat, high token consumption. Agent Skills was proposed in a recent Anthropic paper to address the above challenges. 

 

Agent Skills are now supported in Visual Studio Code (Experimental) and can be used with Github Copilot.  It works across Copilot coding agent, Copilot CLI, and agent mode in Visual Studio Code Insiders. Copilot coding agent is available with the GitHub Copilot Pro, GitHub Copilot Pro+, GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise plans. The agent is available in all repositories stored on GitHub, except repositories owned by managed user accounts and where it has been explicitly disabled.

 

An Agent Skill is created to teach Copilot on performing specialized tasks with detailed instructions while also being repeatable. At its core, Agent Skills are folders which contain instructions, scripts, and resources that the Copilot automatically loads when relevant to the query. On receiving a prompt, Copilot determines if a skill is relevant to your task and it then loads the instructions. The skills instructions are executed along with any resources included in the directory structure relevant to the specific skill. One guideline would be to encapsulate into a skill anything which is being done repeatedly.

 

In the example below, we have a skill for creating a github issue for a feature request using a specific template (the template will be referenced by the skill based on the type of issue to be created). The SKILL.md file is very detailed in all the instructions required for supporting multiple github issues related actions. The description is key to understanding the Skill and when the Agent requires a specific Skill, the appropriate instructions are loaded. The loaded Skill is then executed in a secure code execution environment. A further option provided by Agent Skills is reusing the generated code by storing it in the filesystem to avoid repeated execution. 

  

 

In Visual Studio Code, enable the "chat.useAgentSkills" setting to use Agent Skills prior to the run. An Agent can have nested agents which is used to detail sub agents (Nested Agents is also enabled in settings as shown below) and thus decouple functionality.  Any prompt in the chat will now have the option to pick from the Agent Skills in addition to the tools available. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We can write our own skills, or use those which are shared by others -  anthropics/skills repository or GitHub’s community created github/awesome-copilot collection. While skills are very powerful, using shared skills needs to be done with discretion and from a security perspective only use skills shared by trusted sources.

 

Resources

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-18-github-copilot-now-supports-agent-skills/

 

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/customization/agent-skills