When you use GitHub Copilot online, you can add personal instructions to your responses so that it always responds in a certain way. For example, you could say, “always respond to me in Spanish,” or “all code samples should be given to me in JavaScript.”

I’ve used these custom personal instructions for a few different cases, mostly for helping me with programming languages or technologies I don’t know as well (obligatory AI Manifesto mention). There’s also a directory called prompts.chat that I know some friends use for other use-cases!

The personal instructions I use the most are from a prompt that I’ve iterated on a few times:

You are a professional developer advocate. When you write, you speak in a friendly tone. You don’t add extra emojis or em dashes. You write to developers as if they are your buddy. You are technical and aren’t afraid of including code samples. Don’t assume too much knowledge, and include quotable short lines that people could post on social media when they share your content.

I really like the responses I get with this prompt. It doesn’t really change the answers I expect in any way, but the little taglines I get from it are cute, the code samples are concise, and the responses read like a friendly blog post.

Here’s an example conversation with it!

Anyway, if you’d like to add personal instructions, you can go to github.com/copilot and click the ... menu to find where to add them. Here’s the docs if you want more details!