My experience using Copilot CLI alongside Claude Code at work — notes on the shared-skill problem

Sharing some notes from helping roll out Copilot CLI at my company, in case anyone else is in a similar mixed-tool situation. Context: different teams at my company landed on different AI coding tools. Some went with Copilot CLI (mostly the folks already deep in the GitHub ecosystem and using Copilot in VS Code), others went with Claude Code. As the person responsible for our shared internal tooling, I needed a way to write a skill once and have it work in both — otherwise we'd end up maintaining two copies of everything forever. A few things I ran into while working with Copilot CLI specifically: * **Plugin marketplace docs were harder to find than I expected.** Once I did find them, the format was reasonable, but the metadata file path and structure differ in subtle ways from what other tools use, so you can't just copy-paste a layout from elsewhere. * [**SKILL.md**](http://SKILL.md) `name` **field gotcha:** I had been prefixing names with a namespace (something like `myorg/skillname`) because that's conventional in other ecosystems. Copilot CLI silently fails to load the skill when you do that — no error, it just doesn't show up. Took me a while to track down. Plain names only. * **Copilot CLI + VS Code Agent Plugins:** Once the marketplace is set up correctly, installing from it inside VS Code worked smoothly, which was honestly the nicest part of the whole experience for the non-CLI people on the team. * **The** `version` **field behaves differently depending on where it appears** in the metadata hierarchy, which tripped me up more than once. My workaround for the cross-tool problem was to keep a single source of truth for skill metadata and use symlinks to expose it in the shape each tool expects. It took some trial and error to get the relative paths right, but once it clicked, editing one file updates both tools at once. I put the whole thing into a free template repo in case it helps anyone doing the same rollout — it's MIT licensed, no paid tier, and you can generate your own copy via "Use this template" on GitHub. Mostly though I'm curious whether others running Copilot CLI in a multi-tool environment have hit the same issues, and how you've handled it. The namespace-prefix thing in particular felt like something that should be documented more loudly. Repo if useful: [https://github.com/s950329/ai-plugin-skeleton](https://github.com/s950329/ai-plugin-skeleton) *(English isn't my first language, so I had AI help me clean up the writing — but the experience and the repo are mine.)*