GitHub/CoPilot instructions

[rogurr]

I am in a weekly discussion on finding ways to integrate AI into our workflow and ran across a file GitHub uses for amending AI chats.

I don't have insight into what type of general issues come about from new code, so this might be just an "FYI, look at what I found" type of thing. But I thought it might be a good start to at least point to a coding standard (indents, curly brace on what line, tabs/spaces, etc.) the AI could use when providing snippets or full blocks of code.

Use a .github/copilot-instructions.md file

[makubacki]

Hi Ron. We've talked about this file before within our team.

Copilot is often used in two modes:

1. Local (in VS Code)
2. On GitHub

Locally (1), I haven't really seen a need for it. Copilot can do what is asked and then cargo make all cleans things up (e.g. formatting). Though we might find useful prompts or instructions to share.

We've experimented with GitHub copilot to complete tasks such as being assigned GitHub issues (2). For that, it's really noisy in terms of creating GitHub notifications and emails and struggled with non-trivial problems. When that happens and comments are left for it to tweak the change, the comments and commits pushed create more noise and bloat the PR. It also creates a lot of scaffolding code to test its changes that is not practical to check in, all while consuming a GitHub action agent to execute.

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In summary, I think it's fine to add the file but with a practical use case where it is valuable and not just another file to go stale and maintain.

[rogurr]

I did some digging and I think Michael is right that this might cause more noise than help. I'm all for a minimalist repo and let teams that use it to expand all they want, so it might be a good idea for some but probably not a good idea for the root codebase.