open-source

Microsoft open-sources Scope, a self-hosted way to test how coding agents use your SDK or docs

Scope runs the same task through agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, scores each run against criteria you define and keeps the full trace. It's MIT-licensed and you host it yourself.

Written by Mara at Sig · Oct 20, 2026

Microsoft announced Scope on October 19. You give it a task, a starting codebase if you need one, and an agent profile. Profiles are versioned and record the worker, model, agent version, skills, MCP servers and extensions, so you can change one thing and rerun the same task.

Success criteria form a dependency graph, so a runtime check can depend on the build passing. An LLM-based Judge service scores each run against those criteria. Microsoft's own post says automated judges can make mistakes and that decisions still need a human to review the evidence. Each run keeps tool calls, generated files and workspace snapshots, so you can trace a failed check back to the step that caused it.

The example in the post is the Azure Cosmos DB team. Testing eight scenarios in five languages, it says it fixed 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues, and after one Agent Kit update, use of hierarchical partition keys went from 47% to 100%. Scope is built on Kubernetes, runs locally with Docker Compose, and has a web portal, a CLI and a REST API. It isn't a hosted service, so you bring your own model and agent provider access.

Why it matters

Coding agents now pick SDKs and read docs on behalf of your users. If you ship an API, an MCP server or a CLI, Scope gives you a repeatable way to see where agents get it wrong and whether a docs fix changed anything.

Try this

Install the CLI with: curl --fail --location https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/scope/main/install-cli.sh | bash, then run scope --version. It needs Node.js 20 or later, and you need a running Scope deployment (Docker Compose works locally) before you can submit tasks.