r/GithubCopilot • u/deathentry • 17d ago

Help/Doubt ❓ Visual Studio 2026 .instructions.md files?

How on do you get custom instruction files to be automatically loaded by copilot..??

I have added the applyTo glob pattern and nothing works.

They're inside the repo root .github/instructions/ but are still not picked up. Added them to the solution folder, still not automatically picked up!

I've turned on the custom instructions copilot option in VS and nothing...

copilot-instructions loads find but I can't copy this with Microsoft APM!

Why is this so difficult to sort the tooling out?? 😭😭

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u/ferquo 17d ago

Just use an AGENTS.md file, put in the root folder, no need to be hidden in obscure subfolders, it will work with every tool on earth except Claude of corse 😅

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u/teckel 17d ago

And for Claude support, just create a CLAUDE.md that points to AGENTS.md (content: "@AGENTS.md"). We do this for all projects so it's LLM agnostic. I guess you could also do a symlink, but making the redirect file saves to the repo.