Windows PowerShell 5.1 and Visual Studio Developer Shell Skill

Practical guidance for writing, generating, reviewing, and debugging Windows PowerShell 5.1 scripts and Visual Studio Developer Shell workflows in any Windows VS Code repository.

Part of Agent Kaizen — Agent Kaizen is designed to support reliable AI agent workflows, context engineering, and AI systems engineering in VS Code, Codex, and Claude Code. Build reusable agent skills, reduce unnecessary context loading, add validation loops, and apply Spec → Verifier → Environment scaffolding to new and existing projects.

This repository is the powershell-vsdevshell skill: a reusable, trigger-rich task handbook that an AI coding agent (OpenAI Codex, Claude Code) loads on demand when a task matches its triggers.

What this skill covers

This skill targets Windows PowerShell 5.1 compatibility and Visual Studio Developer Shell workflows: writing 5.1-safe syntax (avoiding PS7-only ternary, ??, &&/|| chains, and ForEach-Object -Parallel), invoking native executables with the call operator, separate argument arrays, the --% stop-parsing token, and capturing $LASTEXITCODE rather than $?. It handles setup, build, and wrapper scripts that call Python, Cargo, npm, MSBuild, and MSVC, including loading and verifying the Developer Shell (Launch-VsDevShell.ps1, vswhere discovery, VSCMD_VER/INCLUDE/LIB checks). It also covers embedded Python generation, file/path/encoding handling (UTF-16 LE BOM defaults, BOM-less writers, long paths), stdout/stderr logging, arrays, hashtables, functions, artifact routing, and AST/JSON/exit-code validation before declaring success.

What's inside

• SKILL.md — frontmatter (name + trigger-rich description) and a lean body.
• references/ — right-sized topic files the agent loads only when relevant (plus INDEX.md and topics.json).
• GOTCHA.md — known pitfalls and edge cases.

Use it

This skill is one git repo inside the Agent Kaizen skills store. The store nests two folders on purpose: the outer SKILLS\ is a VS Code project for building and maintaining skills (its own workspace + tooling), and the inner lowercase skills\ holds every skill as its own repo. That split lets a project pull skills two ways — the whole skills\ folder at once (loads everything — not recommended) or one skill at a time (recommended: load only what a task needs and stay under Claude Code's skill-listing budget).

Paths below use %DEVROOT% — the DEVROOT environment variable pointing at the folder that contains SKILLS\. Set it once by running SetDevRoot.cmd in the SKILLS repo root (no admin); a new shell then resolves %DEVROOT% automatically.

Link just this skill (recommended) — a Windows directory junction, no admin:

mklink /J .agents\skills\powershell-vsdevshell  "%DEVROOT%\SKILLS\skills\powershell-vsdevshell"
mklink /J .claude\skills\powershell-vsdevshell  "%DEVROOT%\SKILLS\skills\powershell-vsdevshell"

Or link the whole store at once (loads every skill — not recommended outside a skills-dev project):

mklink /J .agents\skills  "%DEVROOT%\SKILLS\skills"
mklink /J .claude\skills  "%DEVROOT%\SKILLS\skills"

Remove a link (the store copy is untouched):

rmdir .agents\skills\powershell-vsdevshell
rmdir .claude\skills\powershell-vsdevshell

The agent (OpenAI Codex, Claude Code) then auto-loads this skill whenever a task matches its triggers. Built and validated with skill-drafting to the Agent Kaizen gold standard.

License

Licensed under AGPL-3.0, matching the Agent Kaizen project.