Adding Animated Traffic Flows to Draw.io Diagrams with GitHub Copilot Agent Skills

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I have added optional animated traffic flows to my Draw.io diagram skill. The rule is simple: only animate a connector when the movement helps explain the design. Most diagrams should stay static. For normal architecture diagrams, static connectors are usually the right choice. If the diagram is showing platform layout, ownership boundaries, service dependencies, or … Read more

Keep GitHub Copilot Agent Skills Small and Focused

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One of the easiest mistakes to make with GitHub Copilot Agent Skills is treating them as somewhere to store every useful instruction you have ever written. It usually starts well, you create a Terraform module skill, an Azure architecture skill, a pull request review skill, or a cost optimisation skill. It helps, so you add … Read more

Terraform Module Design Is the Hard Part – So I Built an Agent Skill for It

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Building Terraform modules is rarely the hard part. The harder part is deciding whether a module should exist at all, where the boundary should sit, how much of the provider surface to expose, and which platform defaults should be opinionated rather than endlessly configurable. In this post, I walk through why I built a terraform-module-creator GitHub Copilot skill to help with that design work up front, using live Azure MCP and HashiCorp MCP guidance to shape better module boundaries, interfaces, documentation, validation, and long-term supportability.

The Real Value of GitHub Copilot Rubber Duck

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GitHub Copilot Rubber Duck is interesting not because it adds more AI to the workflow, but because it focuses on a more important problem. In agent-driven coding, the real issue is often not generating code, but catching weak assumptions and flawed plans before they spread across larger changes. This post looks at why a second opinion inside GitHub Copilot CLI makes sense, where it could genuinely help, and why review quality matters more than more generation.

What Makes a Good GitHub Copilot Agent Skill?

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After building a growing set of GitHub Copilot skills across areas such as Azure API Management, infrastructure as code authoring, and diagram generation with tools like Excalidraw and Draw.io, I have found that the difference between a skill that is genuinely useful and one that quietly disappoints usually comes down to a small number of … Read more

Packaging GitHub Copilot Agents and Skills with Agent Package Manager

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If you are building GitHub Copilot agent skills, creating them is usually the easy part. Sharing them across repositories without drift is where things get messy. In this post, I look at using APM to package skills, agents, and MCP configuration in a way that is reusable, focused, and much easier to manage across teams.

Creating Diagrams with an Excalidraw Agent Skill and Excalidraw MCP

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Learn how an Excalidraw Agent Skill powered by Excalidraw MCP in GitHub Copilot can generate Cloud, Terraform, and workflow diagrams from natural language prompts.

Azure Pricing Skill for GitHub Copilot Using Azure MCP

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How I built the azure-pricing skill for GitHub Copilot, using Azure MCP and the Azure Retail Prices API to bring live Azure pricing into architecture and engineering workflows.

AWS Diagram Agent Skill with Draw.io MCP 

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Learn how to generate AWS architecture diagrams automatically using Draw.io MCP and GitHub Copilot Agent Skills. Build consistent, readable diagrams directly from structured inputs and integrate them into engineering workflows.

Automating Terraform provider upgrades with GitHub Agentic Workflows

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Terraform provider upgrades often turn into a manual research exercise. You check the registry, read changelogs, scan the codebase for deprecated resources, update the provider version, add moved blocks, run a plan, and hope nothing breaks. Using GitHub Agentic Workflows, a Terraform MCP server, and reusable agents and skills, much of that preparation can be … Read more