Reverse-engineering a file format nobody had documented yet

HR Studio was AISE’s first build on Copilot Studio’s new skills-based agent experience — new enough that Microsoft hadn’t published how it actually serializes to disk. Rather than guess, AISE used the tooling against itself: repeatedly cloning the live, deployed agent after every portal change and diffing the result to empirically chart the real format.

The gotcha that only live testing could surface

That process surfaced a genuine, non-obvious gotcha: uploading a skill as a .zip silently strips its instructions at runtime — the agent shows the skill as loaded, but the model only ever sees its name and description, never the methodology inside. Only a bare SKILL.md upload inlines the real content. Nothing in Microsoft’s docs said this; it only showed up by testing the live agent’s actual answers, not by reading a file.

Findings became a reusable build guide

Those findings became AISE’s internal new-experience build guide — so the next team building on this platform starts from a working reference instead of repeating days of the same trial-and-error. It’s the reusable-components philosophy applied to knowledge itself.