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Copilot Agent Skills for Power Automate

What are Copilot agent skills?

Agent skills are instruction files that teach GitHub Copilot how to perform specific tasks. When you install a skill, Copilot gains the knowledge to use Flow Studio MCP for debugging, building, and operating Power Automate flows. You describe what you want in plain English, and Copilot follows the skill's step-by-step recipes to get it right.

The three skills

Flow Studio provides three skills, each focused on a different workflow:

Skill What it teaches Copilot You would use it when
power-automate-mcp How to connect to and operate flows — list, read, trigger, resubmit, cancel, inspect connections Any Power Automate task — this is the foundation skill
power-automate-debug A step-by-step diagnostic process for finding and fixing flow failures A flow is broken and you want Copilot to find the root cause and fix it
power-automate-build How to construct valid flow definitions with the right action patterns, triggers, and connection references You want Copilot to create a new flow or modify an existing one

The power-automate-mcp skill is the foundation — install it first. The debug and build skills extend it with specialized knowledge.

Installation
  1. Go to the Flow Studio MCP Skills repository on GitHub
  2. Copy the skill folder(s) you want into your project’s .github/skills/ directory. The folder names are: flowstudio-power-automate-mcp/ (foundation), flowstudio-power-automate-debug/ (diagnostics), and flowstudio-power-automate-build/ (flow creation)
  3. Configure the Flow Studio MCP server in VS Code if you haven’t already — see Getting Started with Flow Studio MCP

Each skill folder contains a SKILL.md file (the instructions Copilot reads) and a references/ folder with supporting documents.

To update skills to the latest version, re-copy the folders from the repository. The skills repo is regularly updated with improved prompts and new capabilities.

Where to find them

Both are listed on GitHub’s awesome-copilot, the official Microsoft-maintained directory:

  • Skills — instruction files that teach Copilot debugging, building, and operating workflows
  • Plugin — a Copilot extension that connects directly to Flow Studio MCP

The underlying SKILL.md files follow the agentskills.io specification — an open standard for distributing agent skills. Any MCP-compatible agent can read them, including Claude, Codex, and custom agents that support the Model Context Protocol.

Troubleshooting
  • Copilot doesn’t use the skills — Ensure the skill folders are in .github/skills/ at the root of your workspace, and that the workspace is open in VS Code. Skills are workspace-scoped.
  • Copilot can’t connect to MCP — Check that the MCP server icon appears in the VS Code status bar. If not, verify your .vscode/mcp.json config file.
  • Skills seem outdated — Re-copy the latest version from the skills repository.
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