How does Aspire make Copilot more efficient when I'm building an app?

Maddy Montaquila explains how a “Aspire-ified” .NET app can give a coding agent more context and control.

Overview

An Aspire-ified app is presented as a way to make GitHub Copilot (and agentic coding workflows) more effective by providing a structured view of the app and its resources.

What Aspire changes for agentic workflows

• Provides more context about the application and its resources.
• Provides more control over resources so an agent can:
  • Start and stop individual resources.
  • Read logs for the whole app in one place.

One-command startup for the full dev environment

Maddy highlights a workflow where a single command can start:

• Every container
• Every process
• The debugger

aspire agent init

The video calls out running the following command:

bash aspire agent init

After initialization, Aspire “drops in skills” that can be used by the coding agent, including:

• OpenTelemetry profiling skills
• Custom resource command skills
• Deployment-related skills