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berry22jelly
berry22jelly

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Does anyone know what will be sent to LLM when I use Github copilot?

Files?
Prompts?
Code snippets?

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anchildress1 profile image
Ashley Childress

Short answer — yes. 😆 If you want all the fine print, GitHub has a solid breakdown on their trust page.

In practice, what gets sent depends on your IDE and settings. By default, Copilot includes any open files (with names and snippets) plus your prompts, passed to the model as user messages. Custom instructions are always included too, unless you’ve changed that or are running in a specific chat mode.

For exclusions, you’ve got a couple of options: a .copilotignore file that works just like .gitignore (glob patterns, nested, or directory-level) and policies that can be set at the repo or org level. And importantly, GitHub enforces a strict no-training policy—none of your data is used to train their models.

Hope that clears it up 😀

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berry22jelly

Is Github copilot using embedding-based semantic search on my codebase? They are store locally or on cloud?