Build CLI

Microsoft Build CLI went public on May 11.

It started with Jeff’s prompt: “What’s new at Build for my project?” The idea was to combine Microsoft Build with GitHub Copilot CLI. His initial thinking involved server-side components, but with six weeks to ship, I thought we could get there with a skill instead.

I had been playing with skills and saw a path: instruct the agent to inventory the user’s current folder, identify technologies, and search the latest docs using Learn MCP Server. After some digging I found the Build sessions endpoint with all presentations at the event, and added latest news from Book of News. That became the first iteration of microsoft-events-skill.

Mike added instructions for the other workflows Jeff had envisioned. Tianqi improved the session catalog search experience: the catalog is 2.5MB, so she created a CLI that caches the JSON and searches in memory outside the agent’s context window. Lots of fine-tuning followed, including creating a plugin to simplify installing and updating.

/plugin install microsoft/Build-CLI

I also made build-ascii this week, an animated ASCII art terminal animation of the BUILD logo. Just for fun.

Build CLI repo

Thanks for reading! :-)