microsoft/skills: 175 Azure and Foundry Skills From the Source

Your coding agent already knows Python beautifully and Azure SDKs vaguely — the API shapes are in its weights, but the current auth flow, the retry policy, the pagination pattern all arrive subtly wrong. microsoft/skills is Microsoft's official fix: a catalog of skills, custom agents, AGENTS.md templates, and MCP configurations for AI coding agents working with Azure SDKs and Microsoft AI Foundry. The repo sits at 3k stars, and the README's rationale is worth quoting: "the patterns are already in their weights from pretraining. All you need is the right activation context."

Why This Skill Matters

The skill catalog is organized by language plugin — Core (11), Foundry (11), Python (39), .NET (28), TypeScript (25), Java (25), Rust (7) — with the Skill Explorer advertising 175 skills in total. The Core set is where the general-purpose value lives: cloud-solution-architect for designing well-architected Azure systems (44 design patterns, Well-Architected Framework pillars), copilot-sdk for building applications on the Copilot SDK, frontend-design-review for interface review, entra-agent-id for OAuth2-capable agent identities. Everything carries the -py / -dotnet / -ts suffix convention so you know which plugin a skill belongs to at a glance.

Beyond skills, the repo bundles role-specific custom agents (backend, frontend, infrastructure, planner), an AGENTS.md template, and pre-configured MCP servers for docs, GitHub, and browser automation — a full context kit for Microsoft-stack work. The repo runs evals and Copilot SDK tests against its skills in CI, which is more quality infrastructure than most community collections bother with.

Installation

The one-command path opens a picker:

npx skills add microsoft/skills

Select the skills you need; they install into your agent's directory (.github/skills/ for GitHub Copilot) and are symlinked if you use multiple agents. Manual installation is documented too — clone and copy the skill folder:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/skills.git
cp -r agent-skills/.github/skills/azure-cosmos-db-py your-project/.github/skills/

Real Workflow: Ground a Cosmos DB Task

1. Install the Python plugin skill for your service — azure-cosmos-db-py for Cosmos DB work.
2. In the same repo, ask the agent for the task as usual:

Add a change feed processor to our Cosmos DB container client

3. The skill carries Microsoft's documented Cosmos DB patterns — FastAPI service layer, dual auth, and partition strategies — instead of plausible pretraining guesses.

The README is emphatic about selectivity: "Loading all skills causes context rot — diluted attention, wasted tokens, conflated patterns." Install per project, not wholesale.

Real Workflow: Architecture Review Before You Build

For greenfield work, install cloud-solution-architect and ask for a design review against the Well-Architected Framework. The skill's catalog description scopes it to architecture styles, technology choices, and mission-critical design — useful when you want the agent to argue trade-offs rather than start coding.

Tips

• Browse before installing: the Skill Explorer at microsoft.github.io/skills lists all skills with one-click install.
• Multi-agent repos can share one checkout — the README shows symlinking .github/skills into .opencode/skills and .claude/skills.
• The repo is under active development with a "Work in Progress" notice; expect new skills and updated SDK patterns.
• For the design rationale, the README links Microsoft's blog post on context-driven development for Azure and Foundry.

When Not to Use This

Every skill assumes the Microsoft stack — Azure services, Foundry, Copilot tooling. An AWS-only or on-prem project gets nothing here, and even on Azure you should resist installing the full catalog: the value is in the five skills matching your actual services, not the 175 in the explorer.

See the leaderboard for more skills.