Your codebase, your rules: Customizing Copilot with context engineering
Harald Kirschner from Microsoft demonstrates advanced context engineering techniques in VS Code, showing developers how to unlock the full capabilities of GitHub Copilot for deeply context-aware AI code generation.
Your codebase, your rules: Customizing Copilot with context engineering
Speaker: Harald Kirschner, Principal Product Manager, Microsoft
Overview
This video delves into optimizing GitHub Copilot within Visual Studio Code by applying context engineering principles. Developers will gain insights into making Copilot more context-aware—tailoring it to not only their codebase, but team workflows and architectural patterns.
Key Topics
Default Copilot Context in VS Code:
- Understand what Copilot “sees” out of the box and the scope of its context window.
Core Techniques
- Using custom instructions and prompt engineering to refine Copilot’s output for specific projects.
- Applying Plan Mode and context engineering to adapt Copilot’s responses to your workflow.
Example Workflow
- How to implement a custom test-driven development (TDD) flow using Copilot and context customization.
Scaling Context Engineering Enterprise-Wide
- Frameworks for implementing context-aware practices across large codebases and teams with Copilot Enterprise.
- Ready-to-use templates for sharing project-wide context and standardized instruction sets.
Getting Started
- Practical recommendations for enabling advanced Copilot features in enterprise environments and setting up your context framework.
Chapters
- 00:00 Welcome to context engineering
- 01:02 What Copilot sees: The default context in VS Code
- 04:59 Core techniques: Using instructions, prompts, and Plan Mode
- 12:18 Example workflow: Custom test-driven development (TDD) flow
- 15:35 Conclusion and getting started
Additional Resources
Takeaways
- Practical strategies for customizing Copilot’s context-awareness
- Framework for scaling Copilot’s capabilities in enterprise settings
- Templates and recommendations for immediate adoption in professional projects