positron

Create a draft pull request for the current session. Use when the user wants to open a draft PR with the session's changes.

Create a hook (.json) to enforce policy or automate agent lifecycle events.

Create an instructions file (.instructions.md) for a project rule or convention.

Create a pull request for the current session. Use when the user wants to open a PR with the session's changes.

Create a reusable prompt file (.prompt.md) for a common task.

Create a reusable skill (SKILL.md) that packages a workflow.

Architecture and hard-won debugging lessons for customization enablement (plugins, MCP servers, agents, skills, instructions) in the agent host. Use when changing how customizations are discovered, published, enabled/disabled, or handed to a provider SDK; when a customization shows the wrong enabled state in the UI; or when a disabled MCP server or plugin is still reaching the model.

Use when investigating a specific named Positron e2e (Playwright) test that is failing or flaking -- in CI ("why is <test> failing on main", "this test is flaky in CI", "is this a test bug or a product bug") or on the engineer's machine ("this e2e test just failed locally", "debug this e2e failure"). From CI it surfaces the test's distinct failure modes from history and pulls evidence for one; locally it reads the run's own trace, snapshot, and logs. Either way it reasons to a falsifiable root cause with the engineer and lands on a test fix, a product-bug issue, or an accepted-flake note. Do NOT use for a test you are writing or currently editing (author-e2e-tests); a whole CI run's failures, or a run ID/URL (e2e-failure-analyzer); Vitest or extension-host failures.

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.

Launch Positron dev server in an isolated, disposable profile and control the Electron workbench. Use to reproduce UI bugs, verify UI changes, inspect the DOM, take screenshots, interact with the workbench, or attach a debugger without first writing an end-to-end test. Do not use to provide a persistent app instance for a person; use the launch-positron command for that. Only runs when a person invokes it explicitly.

Start Positron Web from source and control it with browser automation. Use for web-only bugs, browser-specific behavior, accessibility-tree inspection, console or network diagnostics, and changes that specifically require the web workbench. Prefer drive-positron for ordinary desktop UI verification.

Analyze e2e test failures from a GitHub Actions run. Provide a run ID or URL to download reports, extract traces/screenshots/logs, identify root causes, and get suggested actions. Works with both posit-dev/positron and posit-dev/positron-builds repos.

Explore a running Positron instance as a real user to find genuine problems in a change you just made. Use when asked to exploratorily test, QA, manually test, or poke at a branch, PR, or feature through the real UI. This is discovery testing against the live app to find bugs, NOT writing automated tests; use author-e2e-tests or author-vitest-tests for that. Worth its cost for a user-visible behavior change, not for a refactor or a typo fix. Only runs when a person invokes it explicitly.

Classify and record explicit corrective feedback without turning skills or instructions into append-only knowledge dumps.

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.

Guidelines for fixing unhandled errors from the VS Code error telemetry dashboard. Use when investigating error-telemetry issues with stack traces, error messages, and hit/user counts. Covers tracing data flow through call stacks, identifying producers of invalid data vs. consumers that crash, enriching error messages for telemetry diagnosis, and avoiding common anti-patterns like silently swallowing errors.

Diagnose intermittent VS Code Electron smoke-test failures from the Azure DevOps Flaky Smoke Tests pipeline (definition 700). Covers finding failed iterations, downloading task logs and platform artifacts with Azure CLI, correlating cumulative runner logs, tracing the introducing commit, and queueing focused validation runs.

Generate or modify run commands for the current session. Use when the user wants to set up or update run commands that appear in the session's Run button.

Get the current search results from the Search view in VS Code

Use this to update the Github Copilot CLI/SDK