Iterative File Editing

microsoft/iterative-file-editing

>- Use this skill whenever you create or edit ANY file for the user in the Copilot Studio container — a document, spreadsheet, slide deck, code file, data export, anything. It keeps your work-in-progress durable and shows the user an updated version after every change, so the two of you refine the same file together across turns — the user sees real progress each round, earlier work is never lost, and neither of you has to start over. Apply it from the very first file you make.

1k tokens

context cost

the whole folder, loaded on every use

files

instructions only

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

14 d ago

last touched

this folder, not the whole repository

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/microsoft/cat-agent-skills --skill iterative-file-editing

What comes with it

3 945 bytes besides the instruction

README.md

metadata.json

The instruction itself

1 sections, as written by the author

When you send the user an updated version of a file you've already sent them,

give it a new filename with an incremented version number — report_v2.docx,

report_v3.docx, and so on. If you reuse the filename the user has already

received, the delivery event won't fire and they'll never get the update, even

though the file changed. A filename they haven't seen before is what triggers the

send.

So annotate each iteration with the next version number, and the user receives

every version as its own attachment.

Example

report_v1.docx   first version sent to the user
report_v2.docx   the same file after "make the timeline more detailed"
report_v3.docx   after "also add a budget table"

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take microsoft/iterative-file-editing from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.