Global instructions.md AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md documentation clarification
- Dominant language
- Shell
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Description
### Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve
Provide clear documentation about default behavior of Global instruction md files utilization
### Proposed solution
Provide clear documentation about default behavior of Global instruction md files utilization
This will avoid confusion for end users
There is currently some documentation around this (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-cli/customize-copilot/add-custom-instructions#agent-instructions) although seems to be slightly unclear/inaccurate in comparison to observed behavior of CLI
example (running on Windows os, WSL Ubuntu):
running `/env`:
however, I only have AGENTS.md in ~/.agents and CLAUDE.md in ~/.claude
_additionally for the above, a nice enhancement with respect to release notes of version 1.0.26 - 2026-04-14 "Avoid sending duplicate custom instruction files (e.g. copilot-instructions.md and CLAUDE.md with identical content) to reduce wasted tokens per turn", it would be nice here on the `/env` to demark as "(duplicate)" label suffix or something equivalent there to alleviate user concerns that these may bloat context/instructions sent and that they are properly being de-duplicated by copilot harness_
### Example prompts or workflows
_No response_
### Additional context
_No response_
Contributor guide
Research direction
Start by comparing the observed /env output with the linked GitHub Copilot CLI agent-instructions documentation and determine the default discovery behavior for global instruction files. Done means the documentation accurately explains which files are used and how duplicate instructions are handled, including whether /env indicates deduplication.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Domain
- cli, documentation
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100