Skip to main content

Custom instructions when using GitHub Copilot

Last week when talking about a new release of the JetBrains AI assistant, I noticed a specific feature I really liked; the prompt library. This allows you to tweak the prompts that are used in specific contexts.

This made me wonder, does a similar feature exists for GitHub Copilot? Let’s find out…

Custom instructions(preview)

For GitHub Copilot, a similar feature is in preview; Custom Instructions. With custom instructions you can provide extra context that will be added to your conversations so that Copilot can generate higher quality responses.

To use this feature, we first need to enable it because it is still in preview. I’ll show you how to this using Visual Studio(check the link at the bottom of this post to see the instructions for VS Code).

  • Open Visual Studio (make sure you have the latest version installed)
  • Go to Tools  -> Options
  • Search for custom instructions
  • Select the checkbox for (Preview) Enable custom instructions to be loaded from .github/copilot-instructions.md files and added to requests.

Now that the feature is enabled, we can use it by creating a copilot-instructions.md file in a .github folder at the root of our repository.

Here is an example I created:

If I now ask Copilot a question, my instructions are taken into account:

 



More information

Adding custom instructions for GitHub Copilot - GitHub Docs

JetBrains AI Assistent–Ollama support

Master Copilot Your Way: Unlocking the Power of Copilot Instructions in Visual Studio!

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more