[FEATURE] Copilot CLI user-scope instructions: can apm install -g write copilot-instructions.md

[Kacie2025]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We're trying to use apm install -g to bootstrap Copilot CLI for our team. Looking at the source, targets.py marks Claude as fully supported at user scope, but Copilot CLI has instructions listed in unsupported_user_primitives. Copilot CLI doesn't read *.instructions.md files from a subdirectory at user level. It only reads one specific file: ~/.copilot/copilot-instructions.md. APM doesn't write to that file, so there's no way to get instructions deployed globally for Copilot through APM today.

Describe the solution you'd like

Support deploying instruction primitives to ~/.copilot/copilot-instructions.md at user scope. Maybe by concatenating instruction primitives into that single file, or adding a special case mapping for Copilot.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Placing content in ~/.copilot/agents/*.agent.md. Copilot picks up the agent, but doesn't load its content into every conversation. Agents are on demand, not
  always on like instructions.
• Writing copilot-instructions.md via a script. Works but means maintaining config outside of APM.
• Using project level apm install for .github/instructions/. Works but requires being inside a repo.

[danielmeppiel]

Why not working on a team level package with the instructions that need to be deployed globally?

If it's better to segregate concerns at your scale, a better way is to make sure you leverage apm-policy.yml to mandate instructions packages per project. You can place that in the GitHub org if you use GitHub.

Concatenation in a monolithic global instructions file is an antipattern and won't work well with LLMs.