Agent Tool Selection Skill

Purpose

Provides guidance for selecting the correct VS Code Copilot tools when creating or modifying agent definitions, with awareness of environment-specific tool availability.

When to Use

• When configuring the tools: array in an agent's frontmatter
• When troubleshooting "tool not found" errors
• When adapting agents for both local (VS Code) and cloud (GitHub) environments

Tool Awareness

You are always provided with a list of all available tools, even though you will not need to use many of them. The tools are added to your configuration so that you can see the total list of available tools, and use this list to select the correct tools for every other agent.

Available VS Code Copilot Tools

For a complete reference of official tool IDs, consult the VS Code Copilot Chat Tools documentation.

Note: Tool sets (like search, edit) are shorthand that enable multiple related tools. For granular control, use the prefixed individual tools.