Introducing Copilot Spaces: A new way to work with context ✨

[Akash1134]

Copilot Spaces is a new feature within GitHub Copilot. You can organize and centralize relevant content—like code, docs, files, and (soon) issues—into “Spaces” that ground Copilot’s responses in the right context for a specific task.

Key Features ✨

Create a space

• Organize code, docs, files, and other project context into a space.
• Add custom instructions to help guide responses.
• We’ve made some adjustments to how Copilot works with context in Spaces, so context groundedness should be very high.
• Context is always based on the latest state of your main branch.

Chat with a space

• Ask Copilot questions grounded in the context of your Space for more accurate and relevant answers.

Share it with teammates

• You can share spaces with other members of your organization.

Some of our favorite use cases ⭐

• Answering questions about code: Chris Westra is an engineer on the Spaces team. He grouped all of the code associated with Spaces and added video transcripts from a recorded Spaces session. We use this Space to answer questions about how Spaces works under-the-hood (very meta). 🙂

• Standardizing coding standards and best practices: Rahul Zhade works on a team that advises engineers on secure coding practices. He often answers the same questions over-and-over again in Slack, so he set up a Space. It contains the documentation for our standard auth model, how to do cryptography as well as instructions on how to go through the security review process.

• Writing SQL/KQL queries: Kelly Henckel is a product manager who is very good at writing SQL and KQL queries. She’s created spaces designed to help people self-service writing data queries and creating dashboards. These helpers contain the code for our telemetry schemas as well as example queries.

• Updating documentation: Holly Kassel is a product manager working on billing and licensing. She’s been updating GitHub’s documentation to be more user-friendly based on questions arriving through our customer support channels and discussion posts. She creates spaces for each new batch of documentation which needs to be updated, links the existing code and documentation hosted in GitHub, and adds instructions and frequently asked questions as context. The space generates updated versions of the documentation which can be easily copied into our docs repo.

And more We’ve also been having fun with them. Hubbers created a personal finance space for answering questions about vesting and other benefits, an offsite space for consolidating travel information, and a wombat Space for, uh, wombats? Anyways…

Please share feedback with us 🤝

This is an early preview, so we appreciate your feedback. Give spaces a try and let us know what you think either in this discussion post or through the inline feedback button.

Go to Spaces 🚀

• See the detailed changelog post.
• Learn more about spaces in our documentation on Copilot Spaces.

[JoostVoskuil]

Wow... this was unexpected and very nice.

It seems that I can only select owners as organisations where Copilot Access (to distribute seats) is enabled. I can't see the other organisations. I would expect that this is separate (same as the Coding Agent) policy where license distribution and organization settings are two separate things.

[christopherboard]

Looks good! Adding additional sources in future will be needed for greater adoption and scaling. For us, examples would be Confluence and Jira.

[khenckel]

Glad to hear it Christopher! We're thinking about an MCP integration where you could connect Spaces with 3P servers for Confluence/JIRA/etc.

[christopherboard]

Sounds good. After using this a bit over past 24 hours, I think for an Enterprise like ours, we would for sure need MCP server integration for our other CI/CD/Agile tools with Jira and Confluence being big ones, along with being able to bring in more docs/code from a repo into the space as well. the 50 file limit, based on how our projects are broken down and organized, makes it painful for us to select the right scope for the spaces context. Ideally I could just select a whole repo, as well as some other docs/tickets and then that would give me a fantastic context to leverage this.

[sarthakpati]

This is awesome! It would be great if you could support >50 files directly, though. 😄

[khenckel]

@christopherboard @sarthakpati what are you trying to attach? An entire repo? Or a subset of a repo?

[sarthakpati]

I am trying to attach an entire repo.

[christopherboard]

For us, both. An entire repo would be ideal, but as a backup, some of our projects have A LOT of related files so the limit of 50 does limit the spaces use for some teams.

[khenckel]

Awesome! Can you explain a little bit about how you're trying to use a space with an entire repo? And if you don't mind, could you try attaching the repo you have in mind to regular chat using the 📎 and letting me know how you feel about response quality for those scenarios?

===

I'll also explain a little bit about the current rationale as background context, but since this is such an early preview, we're trying to figure out the right approach long-term. Let me know what you think.

So currently, Spaces have a fixed size. That's because we sometimes hear that, especially for large or complex codebases, the pattern of searching or summarizing context means that important context is left out. Because anyone can create a Space (and hopefully it's easy to create one), we're thinking that the ideal pattern is to have many small, focused Spaces for specific tasks. This preserves a very high response quality, but comes at the cost of having a smaller context and needing to create spaces more often.

Let me know what you think about the trade-off. Would you consider creating multiple small/focused Spaces, or do you feel like that's not the right pattern for your use cases?

[sarthakpati]

So, the project I am looking at this for needs much larger context (it is a ML framework for healthcare data). Developers might be looking at specific features at a time, but they need to have knowledge of how it could impact the larger framework.

[russeg]

how do i delete all the conversations? only way i see is to go to "..." then delete each one manually

[khenckel]

Unfortunately, that is the only way to do it. :/ May I ask what happened and why you'd like to delete all conversations?

[Raventh23]

is there any plan for Copilot Spaces to be reachable through Copilot in the IDE?

[khenckel]

Absolutely! We're starting work on this now.

[andrzejressel]

Will it be possible to share non-organizational Copilot Spaces? I like having my project's docs in there, but currently I'm the only one who can use it.

[khenckel]

Great idea, are you thinking with other specific users?

[andrzejressel]

Nobody in particular - I would like this Copilot Spaces to be alternative way of reading documentation for all users.

[warengonzaga]

Is there a way to use spaces within the VS Code Copilot Extension? I always struggle with Copilot as I work on multiple projects at once and I want to share the details of two repos into one chat. So this maybe solve it having a space for both repo to share context?

[aslafy-z]

This is really nice, awesome additions would be:

• whole repo selection without the need from selecting files one by one
• ways to add more context like pull requests/issues/commit infos
• agentic workflows with MCP support (open pull requests...)