skills: Ground Coding Agents in Azure and Microsoft SDKs

Overview

Microsoft skills is a collection of agent skills, custom agents, MCP configurations, and project guidance for coding agents that work with Azure SDKs and Microsoft AI Foundry. It addresses a gap in general-purpose coding agents: they may know common programming patterns but lack focused context for specific SDKs and services.

The repository suits developers who want to give tools such as GitHub Copilot more targeted guidance without building that context from scratch. Its skills span Python, .NET, TypeScript, Java, and Rust, alongside language-agnostic Foundry and core resources. The project is marked as a work in progress, so treat the guidance as evolving and check official documentation for authoritative details.

Key Features

• SDK-focused skills covering Azure services and Microsoft AI Foundry across multiple programming languages.
• Core skills for tasks such as building MCP servers, creating skills, and designing Azure cloud architectures.
• Custom agent personas, reusable prompts, and an AGENTS.md template for project-specific agent behavior.
• MCP server configurations for documentation, development, and utility workflows.
• Installable Copilot CLI plugins, including an Azure integration and a deep-wiki generator.
• A test harness that evaluates generated code against skill-specific acceptance criteria and scenarios.
• A skill explorer and installation through the skills command-line tool.

Use Cases

• Azure SDK developers can install the skill for their language and service to give a coding agent relevant implementation patterns.
• Foundry developers can use language-agnostic guidance for resource setup, models, hosted agents, workflows, and governance.
• Teams using several coding agents can share skill directories and adapt agent behavior with the included configuration template.
• Contributors maintaining agent guidance can use the test harness to check whether skills produce code that meets defined criteria.

Project Facts

• Language: TypeScript
• License: MIT
• Stars: 3.1k
• Forks: 352
• Topics: agent-skills, agents, azure, foundry, mcp, sdk, skills
• Archived: No

Getting Started

Install the repository's skills and choose what your agent needs:

npx skills add microsoft/skills

See the repository README for manual installation, plugin setup, and testing details.

Alternatives

• skills: It provides agent skills for .NET and C# tasks, rather than guidance focused on Azure SDKs and Microsoft AI Foundry.

Considerations

• The repository describes itself as a work in progress, with skills and tests being updated; verify important implementation details against current official documentation.
• The maintainers recommend selecting only skills needed for the current project, since loading all of them can dilute an agent's context.
• Some skills and Foundry capabilities cover preview or deprecated services and patterns. Check each skill's guidance and service status before relying on it.
• The README notes that the Azure plugin is copied from microsoft/github-copilot-for-azure; contributions to that plugin should be made upstream.
• Testing requires the dependencies and commands documented in the repository's tests directory. The documented harness uses the GitHub Copilot SDK.