THE FIELD NOTES
AI & agentsNote

VS Code Agent Skills Setup

How to create Agent Skills for VS Code Copilot and Claude Code.

Chris House1 min read
A skill beside the repoThe note's agent-skill structure: a skill directory, SKILL.md metadata and instructions, and reusable project context.NOTE / REUSABLE AGENT CONTEXTA skill beside the repoCHRIS HOUSEchrishouse.ioFIELDNOTES / SESSION01 ›.github/skillsOne directory for each skill02 ›SKILL.mdYAML metadata and instructions03 ›Project knowledgeCluster tasks or governance rules04 ›Agent contextReuse the project's conventionsA SKILL.md file packages instructions and metadata for reusable project-specific agent tasks.
In this note

Agent Skills is an open standard from Anthropic for defining reusable instructions that AI coding assistants can load automatically.

The Standard

Skills live in .github/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter:

---
name: my-skill
description: When to use this skill
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: username
  version: "1.0"
---

# Skill Title

Instructions, rules, and context for the AI...

Skills Created

1. aks-cluster-management

Location: .github/skills/aks-cluster-management/SKILL.md

Purpose: Start, stop, and manage AKS clusters for cost optimization.

Contains:

  • Cluster inventory (names, resource groups, VM sizes)
  • Start/stop commands for all clusters
  • Crossplane webhook cleanup before stopping hub
  • Cost information

2. arm-portal-governance

Location: .github/skills/arm-portal-governance/SKILL.md

Purpose: Rules and constraints for GitOps infrastructure changes.

Contains:

  • Critical rules (never/always do)
  • Architecture overview
  • Provisioning flow diagram
  • Environment approval requirements
  • Repository structure

Creating New Skills

  1. Create .github/skills/<name>/SKILL.md with frontmatter
  2. Add the skill content
  3. Copy the content into .claude/CLAUDE.md for Claude Code compatibility

References

aiagentsvscodecopilotclaude