Adding personal custom instructions for GitHub Copilot

Customize GitHub Copilot Chat responses to match your personal preferences.

In this article

Note

Personal custom instructions are currently only supported for GitHub Copilot Chat in GitHub.

For an overview of the methods you can use to customize GitHub Copilot Chat responses, see About customizing GitHub Copilot Chat responses.

About personal custom instructions for GitHub Copilot Chat

You can add custom instructions for GitHub Copilot Chat in order to receive chat responses that are customized to your personal preferences, across your conversations on the GitHub website. For example, you can choose to always have Copilot Chat respond in a preferred language or with a particular style. Some examples of instructions you could add are:

  • Always respond in Spanish.
  • Your style is a helpful colleague, minimize explanations but provide enough context to understand the code.
  • Always provide examples in TypeScript.

Note

  • Multiple types of custom instructions can apply to a Copilot Chat conversation. Personal instructions take the highest priority, followed by repository instructions, with organization instructions prioritized last. However, all sets of relevant instructions are still combined and provided to Copilot Chat.
  • Whenever possible, you should avoid providing conflicting sets of instructions. If you are concerned about response quality, you can also choose to temporarily disable repository instructions. See Adding repository custom instructions for GitHub Copilot.

Adding personal custom instructions

You can add personal custom instructions in Copilot Chat's immersive view.

  1. Open Copilot Chat.

  2. In the bottom left corner, click your profile picture, then click Personal instructions.

  3. Add natural language instructions to the text box.

    You can write your instructions in any format you prefer. For example, you can write them as a single block of text, each on a new line, or separated by blank lines.

  4. Optionally, click to view templates you can use for common instructions. If you click on one of the boxes, such as "Communication", instructions will be added to the text box with placeholders, such as {format} that you can replace with your preferences.

  5. Click Save. Your instructions are now active, and will stay active until you change or remove them.

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