vscode

Primary accessibility skill for VS Code. REQUIRED for new feature and contribution work, and also applies to updates of existing UI. Covers accessibility help dialogs, accessible views, verbosity settings, signals, ARIA announcements, keyboard navigation, and ARIA labels/roles.

Build and review cross-cutting agent-host chat behavior through lifecycle contributions. Use when adding turn lifecycle side effects, prompt or context injection, restored-history transformation, protocol-action observation, or when reviewing changes that add code to AgentSideEffects or AgentService.

Use when writing, recording, updating, validating, or troubleshooting the agent host end-to-end tests under src/vs/platform/agentHost/test/node/e2e (black-box tests that drive the whole agent host over the AHP protocol, using a CapiReplayProxy record/replay system for Claude/Copilot/Codex). Covers adding a cross-provider test, re-recording fixtures after an SDK bump, cross-platform Azure validation, gating non-deterministic or platform-specific tests, and diagnosing replay cache misses.

Analyze Agent Host debug log exports. Use when given an ah-logs or ahp-logs zip/folder, an Export Agent Host Debug Logs bundle, events.jsonl, AHP JSONL transport logs, Agent Host.log, remote-agenthost.log, or copilot-logs.

Identify all files a specific author contributed to on a branch vs its upstream, tracing code through renames. Use when asked who edited what, what code an author contributed, or to audit authorship before a merge. This skill should be run as a subagent — it performs many git operations and returns a concise table.

The VS Code design philosophy — a shared Values→Principles→Moves vocabulary for reasoning about UI in design terms instead of raw pixels. Use when designing, building, reviewing, or giving feedback on any visual surface; when deciding a radius, spacing, type role, icon size, border, color, or motion; or when translating a "this feels off" observation into a concrete, principled fix.

Investigate and fix CI failures on a pull request. Use when CI checks fail on a PR branch — covers finding the PR, identifying failed checks, downloading logs and artifacts, extracting the failure cause, and iterating on a fix. Requires the `gh` CLI.

Launch Code OSS (VS Code from sources) into an isolated throwaway profile with unique debug ports so you can drive it with @playwright/cli AND attach a Node debugger via dap-cli in the same session. Use when working on VS Code itself and you want to interact with the running workbench, automate chat or UI flows, test UI features, take screenshots, set breakpoints in the renderer / extension host / main process, or combine UI driving with debugging.