GitHub GH-300: Apply Prompt Engineering and Context Crafting Practice Questions

Copilot uses neighboring open tabs as a context source, so irrelevant open files can pollute suggestions; closing them is the documented context-optimization practice. There is no organization policy toggle that disables neighboring-tabs context, and doing so would also remove useful context. Renaming files does not exclude them from context — file names are themselves weak signals, and the content is still available. A natural-language 'ignore other files' comment is not a supported directive and Copilot will not honor it as an exclusion rule.

Being specific about intent, inputs/outputs, and constraints; iterating in small, focused steps; and keeping relevant files open (neighboring tabs are a key context source) are all documented best practices. Minimizing detail is wrong — vague prompts produce generic or incorrect results; specificity matters more than brevity. Asking for an entire application in one prompt contradicts the guidance to decompose complex tasks. Avoiding examples is wrong — few-shot examples are an endorsed technique for steering output format and style.

Zero-shot prompting gives the model an instruction with no worked examples of the desired input/output pattern, relying entirely on the model's pretrained knowledge — exactly what this prompt does. Few-shot prompting would include one or more sample inputs and outputs to demonstrate the pattern. Chain-of-thought prompting explicitly asks the model to reason step by step before answering. Retrieval-augmented prompting supplements the prompt with content fetched from an external knowledge source, which is not happening here.

Zero-shot works well for widely represented, conventional tasks, while few-shot shines when the target pattern is proprietary or unusual and must be demonstrated. Few-shot does not involve fine-tuning — examples are supplied in-context at inference time and change no model weights. Zero-shot is not 'always preferred'; examples are often the cheapest way to fix format drift, and the context window is large enough to accommodate a few. Few-shot examples are provided inline in the prompt or in nearby code, not as an uploaded dataset.

#file lets you explicitly reference a specific file in the workspace (via a file picker or by name) so its contents are included as context, even if the file is not the active editor. #selection only refers to the text currently highlighted in the active editor, so it cannot reach an unopened file. #editor refers to the visible contents of the currently active editor tab, which again is not the unopened file. #terminalLastCommand includes the last command run in the integrated terminal and has nothing to do with file contents.