A technical project manager is standardizing Copilot use across squads and confuses one-off chat prompts with persistent repo guidance and reusable skills. Which statement correctly identifies the characteristics of skills, prompts, and instructions?

The correct characterization holds because skills encapsulate repeatable workflows, tools, and context that teams can version, share, and invoke across repositories, prompts express immediate task-specific intent in chat such as explain, refactor, or generate tests for the current selection, and instructions establish persistent defaults for behavior, style, and guardrails via repository or organization configuration that apply without restating them each time. The alternative describing prompts as defining persistent repository rules fails by concept because it attributes instruction persistence and scope to an ephemeral request, confusing a one-time directive with durable governance. The alternative describing skills as ad-hoc chat messages for one task fails by concept because it reduces a packaged, reusable capability to a transient utterance, confusing execution with enablement and losing versioning and reuse. The alternative describing instructions as adjusting tone for a single response only fails by concept because it narrows durable behavioral control to per-answer styling, confusing session defaults with output formatting. An exam caveat is to focus on duration and reuse signals in the stem, with words like persistent, reusable, and task-specific mapping directly to instructions, skills, and prompts rather than to plausible tooling details. A practical check is to inspect where each artifact lives in a real setup by confirming reusable skill folders, reviewing the explicit chat history for task prompts, and verifying persistent instruction files that consistently shape every Copilot response across squads.