Power Automate Authoring Skill

Agent Skill for safe Microsoft Power Automate cloud-flow DEV authoring and diagnosis with Codex and Claude Code.

It combines optional FlowAgent MCP discovery, connector contracts, validation, and run diagnosis with a canonical Git and Power Platform CLI solution workflow. It includes guardrails for naming conventions, runAfter, connection references, deployment settings, pre-import drift checks, TRY/CATCH logging, Power Automate expressions, SharePoint/Dataverse/SQL/HTTP connectors, runtime verification, and tenant-impacting commands.

What It Is For

Use this skill when an agent needs to:

• create, modify, debug, harden, package, import, export, or review Power Automate cloud flows;
• use optional FlowAgent MCP capabilities for inventory, connector operation discovery, preflight, previewed DEV changes, and run diagnosis;
• work with Dataverse solution exports and Workflows/*.json;
• preserve connector contracts, connection references, trigger shapes, and action names;
• define or preserve flow, action, scope, variable, solution, connection reference, and environment variable naming conventions;
• add production-oriented TRY/CATCH logging and structured failure payloads;
• check for portal-side drift before import and avoid silently overwriting another maker's changes;
• verify expressions, run-after paths, idempotency, retry behavior, and runtime tests;
• work from Codex, Claude Code, VS Code, or a local shell using pac, m365, jq, and rg.

This is not a tenant-admin policy guide, licensing guide, or TEST/PROD managed-release guide. It focuses on safe DEV authoring, local validation, controlled DEV imports, and handoff to the project's ALM or release process.

FlowAgent MCP is optional. The skill detects available capabilities at runtime and falls back to PAC, Dataverse, Microsoft 365 CLI, or the Maker portal. It does not depend on a fixed FlowAgent version or tool count.

Control Plane

Need	Preferred path
Inventory, connector schemas, validation, or run diagnosis	FlowAgent MCP when available
Standalone DEV prototype	FlowAgent, created stopped and verified
Solution-aware source and deployment	Git plus PAC solution export/pack/import
Managed flow or cross-environment promotion	Approved solution pipeline
Interactive trigger or missing capability	Maker portal

Before an MCP mutation, the skill requires account, tenant, environment, flow, preview, side-effect, and recovery checks. Direct managed-flow mutation and cross-environment copies used as ALM promotion are rejected.

Repository Layout

power-automate-authoring/
  SKILL.md
  agents/openai.yaml
  references/
    flowagent-mcp.md
    run-output-inspection.md
  scripts/
    validate-workflow-json.py
docs/
  how-to-vscode-codex-claude-code.md
evals/
  001-fix-expression.md
  rubric.md
  ...
scripts/
  validate-workflow-json.py  # repo wrapper for the packaged validator
  validate-skill.sh
  test-install.sh
  package-skill.sh
tests/
  test_validate_workflow_json.py

Install

Install for Codex:

./install.sh

Install for Codex and Claude Code:

./install.sh --target all

Targets:

~/.agents/skills/power-automate-authoring      # Codex user skills
~/.claude/skills/power-automate-authoring      # Claude Code personal skills
~/.codex/skills/power-automate-authoring       # legacy/local fallback only

For current Codex versions, prefer ~/.agents/skills.

Validate

bash scripts/validate-skill.sh
bash scripts/test-install.sh
python3 -m unittest discover -s tests
python3 scripts/validate-workflow-json.py path/to/Workflows/<workflow-file>.json
python3 scripts/validate-workflow-json.py --strict path/to/Workflows/<workflow-file>.json

The installable skill package includes power-automate-authoring/scripts/validate-workflow-json.py. The repository-level scripts/validate-workflow-json.py command is a wrapper for local repo development. By default, hardcoded URLs, emails, GUID-like IDs, and secret-like values are warnings; --strict makes those warnings fail the command.

Behavioral evals also cover FlowAgent DEV routing, managed-flow refusal, read-only run diagnosis, and account/tenant mismatch handling.

Package

Build a local release archive:

scripts/package-skill.sh --version v0.1.0

The archive is written to dist/ and contains the installable power-automate-authoring/ skill directory, including the workflow JSON validator under scripts/. A matching .sha256 checksum is created next to the zip. The checksum records the zip basename, so it can be verified from the download directory with shasum -a 256 -c <zip-name>.sha256.

Publish

Push a version tag:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

The release workflow validates the skill, creates the zip, and attaches it to the hosted release.

Related Guide

The full operational guide is in docs/how-to-vscode-codex-claude-code.md.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.