Distributed backend specialist. Perfectly happy playing second fiddle—it means I get to chase fun ideas, dodge meetings, and break things no one told me to touch, all without anyone questioning it. 😇
Great overview! Just one quick call-out about that AGENTS.md file (and nested siblings), you are 100% correct that coding agent has zero problems with that file and it really is the preferred approach for anything that can use it.
The problem is that if you're also using Copilot elsewhere, the support isn't as up-to-date as coding agent's is! For example, auto-review doesn't support AGENTS.md at all (yet). VS Code and Visual Studio both have basic support, but not necessarily everything.
To get around this in the meantime you can create bothAGENTS.md and a .github/copilot-instructions.md file where one points to the other (and gets deleted once support is picked up everywhere):
## Reference these files if they do not already exist as a reference.
See [AGENTS.md](./AGENTS.md) for repo instructions.
See [docs/AGENTS.md](./docs/AGENTS.md) for documentation instructions.
PS. That "no duplicates" line don't really work as well as you'd hope! But it seems to help with most confusion if it's doubled in context.
Great overview! Just one quick call-out about that
AGENTS.mdfile (and nested siblings), you are 100% correct that coding agent has zero problems with that file and it really is the preferred approach for anything that can use it.The problem is that if you're also using Copilot elsewhere, the support isn't as up-to-date as coding agent's is! For example, auto-review doesn't support
AGENTS.mdat all (yet). VS Code and Visual Studio both have basic support, but not necessarily everything.To get around this in the meantime you can create both
AGENTS.mdand a.github/copilot-instructions.mdfile where one points to the other (and gets deleted once support is picked up everywhere):PS. That "no duplicates" line don't really work as well as you'd hope! But it seems to help with most confusion if it's doubled in context.
@anchildress1 thank you so much for your feedback🙏. And this is a good addition to the post