Unified Git-based Centralization for Copilot Assets

[mathiasbl]

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As a consultancy company, we manage hundreds of client repositories. To ensure quality and consistency, we need to apply our proprietary coding standards, security guidelines, and specialized "skills" across all these repositories.

Currently, we face a fragmented management experience:

• Organization-level "Custom Instructions" are currently limited to a single, multiline text field in the GitHub Settings UI. This is impossible to version-control, peer-review via PRs, or organize into logical modules.
• Sharing reusable .prompt.md files or specialized "Skills" currently requires manual replication or symlinking in every individual repository.

The Proposal: A Universal Asset Hub in .github
We propose extending the functionality of the central {org}/.github (or .github-private) repository to act as the Single Source of Truth for all Copilot configuration.

GitHub should allow the following assets to be stored in the central .github repo and automatically applied organization-wide:

• copilot-instructions.md (or /instructions/ folder): Instead of a UI text box, Copilot should read global instructions from this file.
• Centralized Skills (/skills/): Shared .skill.md directories that are automatically discoverable by any developer in the organization.
• Prompt Library (/prompts/): Shared .prompt.md files that appear in the chat interface across all repositories.
• Custom Chat Modes: The ability to define and "pin" specific personas (e.g., "Security Lead," "Performance Expert") for the entire organization via configuration files.

For this to be effective, these centralized assets must be automatically included in the context of:

• Copilot Coding Agent: It follows our consultancy's architectural standards
• Copilot Code Review Agent: So that automated PR summaries and reviews flag violations against our organization’s global rules

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[vandenberghev]

+1 This is a missing key piece to a uniform roll-out in an organization.

Even with a central versioned SSoT, even more flexibility is still required.
Organizatio-level .md's should be "refinable" or configurable on a lower level.

• E.g. override file paths that are different between repos
• Disable skills or prompts that are not relevant in a specific repo
• Etc.