I talked about Custom Instructions in the past, but can we go further?
You can build your own persona to pair with when using GitHub Copilot. Think about specific, role-defined activities you need to perform on the regular, which would benefit from a specialist rather than a generic approach Copilot could have.
Enter Custom Chat Modes. This is different from the custom command, and it will extend the Modes (think Ask, Edit, Agent) you have in your IDE.
This is where you build your prompt. Be specific, detailed and ensure you cover the behavior you need:
Now, there is a lot more you can do. First of all, you can select the MCP tools you want to add (in this example I used all the built-in ones). Crucially, you can also specify the model you want to use.
Once done you can save it in the .github/chatmodes folder, using a <persona>.chatmode.md name”. This will load it up in Visual Studio Code:
Let’s test it!
You can build as many Personas as you need, and having specialised assistants really goes a long way in a GenAI-augmented developer experience.