Agent Skills in Visual Studio: Teach Copilot How Your Team Works

Visual Studio now supports Agent Skills, reusable instruction sets stored as SKILL.md files that teach GitHub Copilot agents how to handle specific tasks like running build pipelines, generating boilerplate, or following team coding standards. Skills are dynamically loaded per-task (unlike always-on custom instructions), auto-discovered from .github/skills/, .claude/skills/, or ~/.copilot/skills/ directories, and manageable via a new skills panel in Copilot Chat. The post explains how to create skills manually or via a guided UI flow (currently in Insiders), and clarifies when to use skills vs. custom instructions vs. MCP tools.