In February, we announced how GitHub Copilot can now use C++ symbol context and CMake build configuration awareness to deliver smarter suggestions in Visual Studio Code. Today, we’re excited to share new ways to further enhance your C++ development experience with Copilot and get the most out of the language-aware agentic responses, by leveraging custom instructions designed specifically for C++ language tools.

 Enabling Custom Instructions

You can access these custom instructions in the awesome-copilot repo, a community-driven collection of instructions, prompts, and configurations to help users get the most out of GitHub Copilot and tailor its behavior to specific workflows. Specifically, see: awesome-copilot/instructions/cpp-language-service-tools.instructions.md at main · github/awesome-copilot.

To enable these custom instructions, add this file (along with any other relevant custom instructions) to the following path in your repository root: .github/instructions/**. Once added, GitHub Copilot will automatically pick up and apply these instructions for the repo.

These instructions allow Copilot to rely more heavily on C++ language service tools rather than traditional code search tools. This enables more end-to-end C++ workflows grounded in language-powered semantic intelligence rather than manual file searches.

Benefits for C++ workflows

For examples of workflows using these C++ tools, see our announcement blog post: C++ symbol context and CMake build configuration awareness for GitHub Copilot in VS Code – C++ Team Blog.

Whether you’re maintaining large legacy codebases or adopting modern C++ standards, these custom instructions help Copilot provide more relevant, actionable assistance directly in your workflow. By integrating them into your repository, you can improve productivity and code quality across common C++ development tasks.

Learn more and share feedback

We’re excited to continue improving these tools and other C++ integration points based on feedback, and we encourage you to try them out and let us know how they fit into your C++ workflows. Download the C/C++ DevTools extension and give it a try. Please file any issues or feedback in the appropriate repository. For CMake-related functionality: Issues · microsoft/vscode-cmake-tools and for C++-related functionality: Issues · microsoft/vscode-cpptools