Agent skills

Give Copilot repeatable workflows with task-specific instructions, scripts, and resources.

Who can use this feature?

Copilot cloud agent is available for all paid Copilot 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.

GitHub Copilot CLI is available with all Copilot plans. If you receive Copilot from an organization, the Copilot CLI policy must be enabled in the organization's settings.
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In this article

About agent skills

Agent skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that Copilot can load when relevant to improve its performance in specialized tasks. The Agent Skills specification is an open standard, used by a range of different AI systems.

You can create your own skills to teach Copilot to perform tasks in a specific, repeatable way—or use skills shared online, for example in the anthropics/skills repository or GitHub's community-created github/awesome-copilot collection.

For example, a skill for writing release notes can include your team's template, a script for gathering changes, and instructions for grouping them. The agent loads those resources when working on release notes, rather than including the whole workflow in every conversation.

Where you can use agent skills

You can use agent skills with:

  • The GitHub Copilot app.
  • GitHub Copilot CLI.
  • Copilot cloud agent and Copilot code review on GitHub.com.
  • Agent mode in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains IDEs.

IDE support depends on the version you use. See Copilot feature matrix.

Finding and storing skills

You can also use gh skill in GitHub CLI to discover and install skills from GitHub repositories. For more information, see Adding agent skills for GitHub Copilot.

Copilot supports:

  • Project skills, stored in your repository (.github/skills, .claude/skills, or .agents/skills)
  • Personal skills, stored in your home directory and shared across projects (~/.copilot/skills or ~/.agents/skills)

Supported locations depend on the surface. Use its setup guide to choose a location rather than assuming that a personal skill is available to an agent running in the cloud.

Next steps

To create or add agent skills, see: