How does the new agent experience decide which skills are "in context"? Curious about a routing quirk (+ a workaround that seems to help).
Hey all, really enjoying building agents in the new Copilot Studio experience (generative orchestration, markdown Skills), and I ran into something I'd love to understand better.
I've got about 11 custom Skills registered, well under the 100-skill limit. From the docs and the CAT blog, my understanding is that the agent keeps all the Skill names and descriptions in context, and only pulls a Skill's full instructions in when a request matches.
What I'm seeing is a little different, though. One of my Skills (for developing/challenging a concept) has a pretty specific description, and it fires reliably in a smaller test agent with ~5 Skills. But in my main 11-Skill agent, it doesn't get picked for the obvious prompt — it only kicks in after I nudge it, or if I remove a couple of the other Skills. Same prompt, same description; the main thing that changes is how many Skills are registered.
My rough assumption is that there's some kind of "active menu" of Skills that's only a partial scope of everything I've registered — i.e. not all descriptions are actually in view each turn, just a subset the runtime picks.
A workaround that seems to help: when I add an instruction (or just do it in the canvas) telling the agent to run a quick bash listing over its skills folder at the start, then suddenly all the Skills get discovered correctly — and the meta descriptions stay present for the rest of the conversation, so routing works from there on. So right now my fix is basically "do that folder scan once at the beginning." Works, but feels like a hack rather than how it's meant to be.
So I'm just trying to figure out how it actually works:
- Are all registered Skill descriptions really considered every turn, or is there some kind of relevance ranking / subset (an "active menu") when you have more of them?
- Is "100" just a registration cap, or also roughly how many can be actively considered at once?
- Anything I can do to nudge which Skills get surfaced, beyond writing good descriptions — or is the folder-scan workaround the pragmatic answer for now?
Might well be something on my end — happy to share more detail. Just curious if anyone's run into the same thing or knows the mechanism. Thanks! 🙂