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Path-specific custom instructions not working in Agent mode

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#637 5 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
38/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
swift
Domain
desktop, developer-experience

Research direction

Reproduce the issue in a new project using Copilot for Xcode 0.45.0, Xcode 26.1, and an instruction with applyTo set to '/*.swift'. Compare Agent mode behavior with applyTo '', then check whether the Xcode custom-instructions documentation covers path-specific instructions; done means the Swift-file filter is honored in Agent mode and the documentation matches the supported behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

reviewed

When using Agent mode, the applyTo filter that can be setup for Path-specific custom copilot instructions doesn't work.
As far as I can tell, the only applyTo value that worked for me was **.

This doesn't seem to work, for example:

---
applyTo: '**/*.swift'
---
Instruction here

From what I can see, Path-specific custom instructions don't even appear in the documentation, under the Xcode tab, but they appear as a feature in the app.

Versions

  • Copilot for Xcode: 0.45.0
  • Xcode: 26.1
  • macOS: 26.1

Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a new project
  2. In Github Copilot settings, go to Advanced -> Under Custom Instructions -> Create
  3. Enter a file name
  4. In the prompted file, under the applyTo field, type something like '**/*.swift'
  5. Add some test instructions
  6. Open chat in a swift file, select agent mode.
  7. See the agent not considering the instructions given at step 5.
Dominant language
Swift
Stars
6.3k
Forks
2k
Avg merge
3d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
2

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