Document Copilot's new customization: Prompt files

[digitarald]

Prompt Files in GitHub Copilot Chat are designed to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, and bringing domain-specific expertise to developers’ fingertips. With reusable and shareable prompts, developers save time, maintain consistency, and tackle complex tasks with ease. While the existing file-based custom instructions help to add codebase-wide context to each AI workflow, developers add specific prompts as they need them, which makes them scale to the complexity of larger multi-faceted codebases.

Usage:

• *.prompt.md in .github/prompts
• reference other files as markdown links or #file:… references
• Attach to Chat and Edits using the 📎 button, which will also add the linked references.

Use cases:

Streamlining repetitive tasks with reusable prompts.

                  react-hook-form generates a form component with TypeScript types and validation logic tailored to a team’s design system

mock-api-response creates Jest/Mocha tests with mocked API calls, leveraging existing service interfaces

legacy-db-migration generates scripts to refactor outdated SQL schemas into modern ORM models, with inline documentation

Bringing domain-specific expertise to developers on demand, enabling them to tackle complex tasks in specialized areas without requiring deep prior knowledge.

                  hipaa-compliance-check generates code to validate HIPAA-compliant data handling.

                  financial-transaction guidance idempotent API endpoints with audit logging.

                  secure-api guidance for building API endpoints with rate limiting, CORS policies, and input validation.

Also: Enhancing team collaboration and knowledge sharing. Store snippets for frequently used design patterns or architectural guidelines, referencing additional files (e.g., API specs, design docs) for context. Serving as a learning and onboarding tool. Snippets that encapsulate step-by-step explanations for complex processes, project-specific patterns or legacy system quirks.