Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/main/.github/copilot-instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chatWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/copilot-instructions)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/copilot-instructions/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/copilot-instructions"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat/copilot-instructions.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.03970 | $0.03970 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.01588 | $0.01588 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00794 | $0.00794 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00397 | $0.00397 |
Grade A, and why
vscode-copilot-chat copilot-instructions.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 1mo ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 353 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
GitHub Copilot Chat Extension - Copilot Instructions
Project Overview
This is the GitHub Copilot Chat extension for Visual Studio Code - a VS Code extension that provides conversational AI assistance, a coding agent with many tools, inline editing capabilities, and advanced AI-powered features for VS Code.
Key Features
- Chat Interface: Conversational AI assistance with chat participants, variables, and slash commands
- Inline Chat: AI-powered editing directly in the editor with
Ctrl+I - Agent Mode: Multi-step autonomous coding tasks
- Edit Mode: Natural language to code
- Inline Suggestions: Next edit suggestions and inline completions
- Language Model Integration: Support for multiple AI models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, etc.)
- Context-Aware: Workspace understanding, semantic search, and code analysis
Tech Stack
- TypeScript: Primary language (follows VS Code coding standards)
- TSX: Prompts are built using the @vscode/prompt-tsx library
- Node.js: Runtime for extension host and language server features
- WebAssembly: For performance-critical parsing and tokenization
- VS Code Extension API: Extensive use of proposed APIs for chat, language models, and editing
- ESBuild: Bundling and compilation
- Vitest: Unit testing framework
- Python: For notebooks integration and ML evaluation scripts
Validating changes
You MUST check compilation output before running ANY script or declaring work complete!
- ALWAYS check the
start-watch-taskswatch task output for compilation errors - NEVER use the
compiletask as a way to check if everything is working properly - FIX all compilation errors before moving forward
TypeScript compilation steps
- Monitor the
start-watch-taskstask outputs for real-time compilation errors as you make changes - This task runs
npm: watch:tsc-extension,npm: watch:tsc-extension-web,npm: watch:tsc-simulation-workbench, andnpm: watch:esbuildto incrementally compile the project - Start the task if it's not already running in the background
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 1mo ago First seen · 353 lines · 3,970 tokens per session scan A 572dbaecc398
vscode-copilot-chat copilot-instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository microsoft/vscode-copilot-chat (9,960 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 3,970 tokens to every session, about $0.0159 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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