Unclear on how to use with VS Code Copilot

[s-h-a-d-o-w]

The standard way of using skills with the copilot extension is to install the skill to ~/.agents (like your CLI does by default) and then to type /some-skill in the chat to force its use. (Apparently. Caveman is the first skill that I'm interested in.)

This usage isn't mentioned anywhere here (I only saw "VS Code: repo-wide instructions via --with-init" - I guess this would install the skill into a given repo? But why do that when Copilot can use ~/.agents?) and it doesn't work. When I asked Claude about it, it said:

You did nothing wrong, and VS Code passed the skill correctly. The full skill file came attached to your first message, with your task as its argument. The mistake was mine.

I focused on the coding task and treated the skill as a general hint to "be short." I didn't apply its specific rules. My final summary still used full prose, connecting phrases and a side note. The skill bans those.

The system prompt asks for brief answers but doesn't conflict with caveman, so there's no excuse there.

I'm not talking about multiple turns or sessions. I sent a single initial prompt and the response from Claude was verbose.

[vishalhabib99]

Your ~/.agents install isn't the problem. VS Code's docs say a skill's body loads when you invoke it with /, and describe skills as "task-specific, loaded on-demand" and custom instructions as "always applied". So the rules did reach the model, as your first reply suggests, but a skill is still only instructions. Nothing forces the model to follow them, and its explanation afterwards isn't reliable evidence of why it didn't.

--with-init isn't about installing the skill. It writes an always-on rule to .github/copilot-instructions.md in the current repo, and INSTALL.md names it as the always-on path for VS Code Copilot Chat. It also adds rule files for Cursor, Windsurf, Cline and AGENTS.md, so if you only want Copilot, use the manual route in INSTALL.md: download src/rules/caveman-activate.md to that path. Note that this overwrites any existing copilot-instructions.md, so append it if you already have one.

I haven't run this in VS Code myself, and INSTALL.md says its VS Code plugin path is untested too. It would be useful to know if the rule file gives you terse replies where the skill didn't.