Vonage Learning

• Google doc here
• What are Skills, Agents, Prompts, Instructions and how to use them?
• AWS re:Invent 2025 - Introducing AI driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC) (DVT214)

table of contents

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• Vonage Learning
• What are Skills, Agents, Prompts, Instructions and how to use them?
  • AGENTS.md
  • Custom Agents
  • Hooks
  • Instructions
  • Prompts
  • Skills
  • Workflow
• AI-DLC

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What are Skills, Agents, Prompts, Instructions and how to use them?

• A prompt is a one-time chat message.
• An instruction is a permanent rule for a project.
• A skill is a tool the AI loads only when needed.

AGENTS.md

• inspired by CLAUDE.md from Anthropic
• Instead of having md files for each vendor
• .github/copilot-instructions.md used for github copilot as your PR code reviewer
• /init
• AGENTS.md sections
  • Architecture overview
  • Dos and Donts
  • Comments
• Better to have AGENTS.md for each project module as well

Custom Agents

• agents folder
• They are like specialized colleagues, can be given some personality
• Orchestrator Agent, Planner Agent and Coder Agent
  • cleaner context memory
• .github/agents, uses tools
• github/awesome-copilot
• SubAgents vs Agent Teams
  • Subagent reports back to orchestrator
  • Agent team communicate with other agents

Hooks

• hooks folder
• Hooks run before agents are loaded
• They have lifecycle methods like sessionStart, sessionEnd, userPromptSubmitted etc
• Try some hooks from awesome-copilot
• example : secret scanner and governance-audit
• Show agent logs in vscode, ask a questions in chat -> setting (gear icon) in chat -> agent logs
  • Loaded instructions -> skills -> hooks -> agents

Instructions

• instructions folder
• has applyTo liquid attribute
• mention in main AGENTS.md when to refer which instruction
• A global rule file that stays active across the whole project. example use java 11 and gradle instead of maven

Prompts

• prompts folder
• use /explain-code for .github/prompts/explain-code.prompt.md
• example: brief overview, step-by-step breakdown, key concepts and terms, common use cases

Skills

• skills folder
• Folder based capability packages with a required SKILL.md that are loaded by an Agent on-demand
• .github/skills/breakdown-plan/SKILLS.md will create some docs
• invokable
• Persistent, modular files loaded only when triggered.

Workflow

• workflow folder
• Copilot coding agent works anonymously in a Github actions-powered env to complete development tasks and creates pull requests with the result.
• daily-issues-report

AI-DLC

• AI driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC)
• Approach 1 : AI Managed
  • AI autonomously builds and maintains software with leasat ot zero human involvement
• Approach 2 : AI Assisted
  • Developers still perform the intellectual heavy lifting and apply AI in narrow tasks