Launch

You're hacking on VS Code itself and need to launch a build from sources with Copilot already signed in, drive it with Playwright, and optionally attach a debugger to the renderer, extension host, or main process. This solves the annoying problem of port conflicts and profile pollution when testing UI flows or taking screenshots. It clones your authenticated profile to a throwaway temp dir (excluding workspace storage and caches but keeping auth tokens), picks free debug ports for every surface, and blocks until CDP is up before printing everything as JSON. The slim clone is smart about what matters for auth. If you've ever fought with multiple Code OSS instances stomping on each other's ports or wondered why your test instance lost its GitHub login, this is for you.

skills.sh installs: 304
GitHub stars: 195.3K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add microsoft/vscode --skill launch --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Code OSS Dev - Launch + Debug

You're working on VS Code itself and you want to:

Launch a Code OSS build from sources that is already signed in (Copilot, GitHub, etc.) so chat / agent flows work end-to-end.
Drive it with @playwright/cli over CDP (UI automation).
Optionally attach a debugger via dap-cli to set breakpoints in the renderer, extension host, or main process.
Run multiple instances at once without port conflicts.

This skill provides a launcher that clones an authenticated user-data-dir to a throwaway temp folder, picks free ports for every debug surface, and prints them as JSON so you can pick them up programmatically.

The clone is slim: workspace storage, browser caches, file history, cached VSIX backups, and old logs are excluded by default. On macOS, auth tokens live in the OS keychain plus small files inside User/globalStorage - both of which are preserved. On Windows the GitHub session lives in the shared-data-dir instead, which the launcher seeds separately (see Windows authentication).