microsoft/discovery

microsoft/discovery

Description: Microsoft Discovery community repository

Language: Python

License: MIT

Stars: 154

Forks: 28

Open issues: 1

Created: 2026-05-15T21:27:52Z

Pushed: 2026-06-09T17:03:52Z

Default branch: main

Fork: no

Archived: no

README:

Microsoft Discovery community

Welcome to the Microsoft Discovery community — the public home for the Discovery platform, where users, partners, and the product team build together. Share what you've built, ask questions, file bugs, suggest ideas, and see what other Discovery users are doing across disciplines.

> Microsoft Discovery is an extensible platform that brings together agentic orchestration, advanced reasoning, a graph-based knowledge foundation, and high-performance computing for accelerating scientific research and R&D workflows.

Microsoft Discovery is offered in two complementary experiences: an enterprise-grade platform powered by Azure, and a local app with select features and capabilities. The two share the same core concepts and features.

| Experience | What it is | Where to start | | --- | --- | --- | | 🖥️ Microsoft Discovery app | A local-first Windows client for individual evaluation on a laptop. Distributed from this repository. | [docs/discovery-app/](docs/discovery-app/) — install, quickstart, feedback | | ☁️ Microsoft Discovery | The cloud-hosted, team-scale experience on Azure. | Microsoft Learn — full reference |

In addition, this repository hosts the public Discovery Catalog — the canonical metadata catalog of AI research agents and starter kits contributed by Microsoft and ecosystem partners. Agent code, container images, and model weights live in each contributor's own infrastructure; the metadata and documentation that describe them live here, where they are PR-reviewed, schema-validated, and surfaced to every Discovery user.

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🧭 Core concepts

The canonical conceptual reference for both the app and the services is Microsoft Discovery on Microsoft Learn. The starting points most users want:

• Microsoft Discovery & the Microsoft Discovery app - detailed comparison of Discovery experiences
• Discovery Agent concepts — what an agent is and how it's invoked
• Discovery Engine overview — the cognition layer
• Bookshelf and Knowledge Bases — how indexing and retrieval work
• Tasks and investigations — the task-graph model

For an app-specific 15-minute hands-on tour, see [docs/discovery-app/quickstart.md](docs/discovery-app/quickstart.md).

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📦 What's in this repository

| Surface | What it is | Best for | | --- | --- | --- | | 📥 [Releases](https://github.com/microsoft/discovery/releases) | Signed Windows installers and release notes for the Discovery app. | Downloading the latest build of the app. | | 🤖 [`agents/`](/agents/) | Catalog of AI research agents (1P and 3P) surfaced in Discovery. Each entry contains a metadata.yaml, agent.yaml, README.md, and optional tools/. | Browsing what's available, or contributing a new agent. | | 📑 [`docs/`](/docs/) | Documentation and pointers for both Microsoft Discovery and the Discovery app, including documentation for authoring guides and schemas. | Learning more about Discovery experiences and best practices. | | 🎥 [How to videos](/docs/how-to-videos/README.md) | Curated how-to video content for Discovery workflows and onboarding. | Watching guided walkthroughs and quick task demos. | | 🧰 [`starter-kits/`](/starter-kits/) | Catalog of starter kits — kit.json manifests that bundle one or more catalog agents into a launchable scenario. | Browsing pre-built workflows, or publishing a new kit. | | 💬 [Discussions](https://github.com/microsoft/discovery/discussions) | Q&A, Ideas, Bugs, and Show-and-tell — the single place for everything from "how do I…?" to bug reports, ideas, and sharing what you've built. | Asking questions, suggesting ideas, sharing what you've built, and reporting bugs. | | 🧪 [`.github/skills/`](.github/skills/) | Three Copilot skills auto-discovered by Copilot CLI and VS Code Copilot Chat — for browsing the catalog and deploying agents / starter kits to Microsoft Discovery services (cloud, via Microsoft Foundry). Not used by the local Discovery app today. | Researchers and developers integrating the catalog into a Microsoft Foundry workflow. |

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🚀 Get started

Install and use the Discovery app

The Microsoft Discovery app is a self-contained Windows application — no SDK, no cloud setup, no IT ticket. Download the latest release installer and follow the [Quickstart guide](docs/discovery-app/quickstart.md) to get started.

Have feedback? See [docs/discovery-app/feedback.md](docs/discovery-app/feedback.md).

Browse the catalog

• Agents: open the agents/ directory — each folder is one agent with its own README.md.
• Starter kits: open the starter-kits/ directory — each folder contains a single kit.json describing the bundled agents, sample prompts, and risk profile.
• Programmatic access: the same content is exposed as a single aggregated JSON in [.auto-registry/agent-registry.json](.auto-registry/agent-registry.json) and [.auto-registry/starter-kit-registry.json](.auto-registry/starter-kit-registry.json), regenerated automatically on every merge.

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🤝 Contributing

All contributions — from Microsoft engineers and external partners — arrive via pull request from a fork. Direct pushes to main are not permitted.

| Type | Goes to | First read | | --- | --- | --- | | New agent | agents// | [Agent authoring guide](docs/authoring-guides/agent-authoring-guide.md) | | New starter kit | starter-kits// | [Starter-kit authoring guide](docs/authoring-guides/starter-kit-authoring-guide.md) | | Documentation fix | docs/, README.md, etc. | [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) | | Idea / feature request |…