Agents, Skills, and AI Workflows in VS Code

Build a dedicated Copilot agent that uses a reference folder of documentation you choose and can alter, incident notes, and snippets of common issues to troubleshoot new logs faster with retrieval-style context.

How To Set It Up

1. Create a reference/ folder with the exact reference documents you want it to use, known error signatures, and resolution notes.
2. Add a custom .agent.md focused on troubleshooting and root-cause analysis.
3. Create one or more SKILL.md files for parsing logs, matching patterns, and proposing fixes.
4. Attach those skills to the agent so it consistently follows your triage workflow.
5. Prompt the agent with new logs and ask it to compare against the reference folder before recommending actions.

Why This Works Well

• Keeps the agent focused, and if you add limits to the tools it can't attempt any rewrites.
• Reduces repeated manual searching across old tickets and files.
• You are able to prompt it to ensure the responses it gives meet your standards to reduce edits before passing information along, and to speed checking the results
• You can ask for it to find links to the information in the documentation to support its answers

Copilot Build Assist

Copilot can help generate both the agent and skills: ask it to scaffold your .agent.md, draft SKILL.md instructions, and refine prompts for better troubleshooting output over time.

Tip: Use Copilot and explain what you want the agent to focus on. After it writes the agent for you, ask Copilot if there are any useful skills it sees that might help the agent function better. It is amazing what it can come up with to help itself improve.

You can take the reference folder you created, and prompt the agent to go through the files and restructure them for its efficiency. Create new documents to document types that are more efficient, and rename or reorganize to improve retrieval, and use less tokens. This is a great way to optimize the agent's performance without changing the underlying code of the agent or skills, just by improving the materials it uses to reference.

Tip: Make sure you tell the agent not to 'rewrite' the information, but to only restructure it. You don't want to lose any of the important information, just make it more efficient for the agent to reference.