Agent Instructions

Guidelines for AI-assisted development, written with the intent of becoming a practical standard for teams across the Government of British Columbia.

Not an official BC Government publication. Content here reflects community work in progress. It does not speak for, bind, or represent the Province of British Columbia. We welcome contributors so this can grow into something genuinely useful for public-sector developers in BC.

The canonical text lives in instructions.md at the repo root.

Use this file

You can apply these instructions at different levels depending on your setup:

Global-level (Linux/macOS/WSL)

Copy the root file into your global Copilot instructions folder to apply these guidelines across all your local sessions:

mkdir -p ~/.copilot/instructions
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcgov/agent-instructions/main/instructions.md \
  -o ~/.copilot/instructions/instructions.md

Project-level (Repository)

Copy the root file into individual repositories as .github/copilot-instructions.md for project-specific customization:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcgov/agent-instructions/main/instructions.md \
  -o .github/copilot-instructions.md

Org-level (Organization)

Configure custom agent instructions for your GitHub Organization by copying the contents of the raw file and pasting them directly into your organization's settings.

Important

GitHub enforces a 4,000 character limit for organizational Custom Instructions. Keep instructions.md under that limit (CI validates on every PR).

Agent guardrails (enforcement)

These have moved to their own repository.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcgov/agent-guardrails/main/setup.sh | bash

Contributing

We want this to become something teams across BC can actually adopt. Open a PR to improve instructions.md. Keep it under 4,000 characters, stay concrete, and explain the why in the PR description when a rule is non-obvious.