Personal custom instructions, Bing web search, and more in Copilot on github.com

Personal custom instructions are now available in public preview for Copilot on github.com 🎉

Copilot Chat on github.com now supports personal instructions! This means you can provide Copilot with important details about your preferences, such as your preferred language, response style, or even code standards.

To get started, open up Copilot Chat, click ..., and select Personal instructions. That’s it! Copilot will now incorporate your preferences for all chats in github.com.

💡 Looking for ideas? Here are some examples to kick things off:

  • Language preferences: “Always respond in Portuguese.”
  • Response preferences: “Be concise and to-the-point. Always cite your sources.”
  • Personal preferences: “You are a seasoned React developer with ten years of experience.”
  • Code preferences: “Always provide examples in TypeScript.”

Looking for more? Visit prompts.chat for more inspiration.

Search the web 🔍 in Copilot chat using Bing

Copilot Chat can now search Bing to answer questions and find information beyond its general knowledge or your codebase. This feature makes it easy to chat about recent events, trends, and new developments. It’s now generally available in VS Code, Visual Studio, and github.com.

Since our public preview, we’ve enhanced our web search capabilities to deliver more relevant and accurate responses to your questions.

Give it a try today:

  • “What’s the latest version of React?”
  • “What are the most recent updates in Python’s machine learning libraries?”

Quality improvements to Copilot Chat

In the last month, we have delivered a collection of quick wins and subtle enhancements ✨, making the product smoother and more delightful for everyone.

What’s new:

  • Better search in Copilot Chat for more relevant and complete answers, including expanded lexical search results and larger semantic search responses for better context
  • Improved memory in Copilot, now keeping more of your chat history for better context and flow
  • Improved Copilot Chat’s awareness of the README.md when asking about a repository
  • Enhanced Copilot’s awareness of time, showing times relative to you instead of UTC

We also recently added the ability to view and generate new code files to Copilot chat at github.com/copilot – check it out!

Copilot Workspace: Follow ups and file search improvements

Copilot Workspace Changelog Header

This week’s Copilot Workspace updates center around improving multi-file code generation and search capabilities. Alongside continued improvements to performance and reliability, we are releasing two features: follow ups and a simplified file search experience.

Let’s dive in!

Follow ups

When you’re working within a large repository that has complex file dependencies, even simple changes can have significant impacts across the codebase. Invoking Copilot Workspace’s new follow up capability triggers a thorough check across the codebase, automatically editing the necessary files if any follow ups are detected.

Whether you have changed a function name, modified function parameters, or modified a shared class definition, Copilot’s follow ups can swiftly handle dependent fixes across your repository, saving you time and increasing confidence in your changes before you raise a PR!

File search experience improvements

We’ve updated the file search experience to help you maintain context in your file tree while searching for other files to open. Rather than filtering the file tree on search, we now return results in a separate menu that searches the entire repository rather than what is currently visible in the tree. You can open files in new tabs directly from this search.

Providing feedback

Please give your feedback in our GitHub Discussion. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Secret scanning detects Base64-encoded GitHub tokens

GitHub continually updates its detectors for secret scanning with new patterns and upgrades of existing patterns, ensuring your repositories have comprehensive detection for different secret types.

GitHub now automatically detects Base64-encoded secrets for the following token types:

  • GitHub personal access tokens
  • GitHub OAuth access tokens
  • GitHub user to server tokens
  • GitHub server to server tokens.

GitHub secret scanning protects users by searching repositories for known types of secrets such as tokens and private keys. By identifying and flagging these secrets, our scans help prevent data leaks and fraud. See the full list of supported secrets in the documentation.

Learn more about secret scanning or join the discussion on our dedicated GitHub community.

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