Arin's Tech Musings

GitHub Copilot's customization system separates into four distinct layers: custom agents, instructions, skills, and MCP servers. Each handles a different concern, and they compose together while remaining independently upgradeable. The key insight: separating "who" (agent workflow), "rules" (project standards), and "how" (capabilities) means you can change one without touching the others. Update standards without rewriting agents. Upgrade skills without modifying instructions. Change agent behavior while keeping conventions intact. Everything lives in git. Changes go through pull requests. You can review, approve, and roll back AI behavior like infrastructure. > **Honest disclaimer:** The thoughts here are mine — the prose, structure, and general readability are courtesy of AI. I handed it a brain-dump and it handed back something you'd actually want to read. ```mermaid graph TB subgraph "GitHub Copilot Architecture" ...

GitHub Copilot custom agents make it possible to move beyond a single “do everything” assistant. Instead, you can design workflows where multiple agents collaborate, each focused on a specific responsibility. In this post, I’ll walk through three orchestration modes you can use today when building custom agents in VS Code: VS Code agent handoffs Explicit subagent delegation Automatic subagent delegation Each mode serves a different purpose. Understanding the trade‑offs helps you decide when you want user control, when you want structure, and when you want the agent to adapt on its own. 1. VS Code Agent Handoffs ```mermaid sequenceDiagram participant User participant MainAgent participant SecurityAgent User->>MainAgent: scan my code for security issues MainAgent->>SecurityAgent: handoff (code review) SecurityAgent-->>MainAgent: report findi...

  According to the World Economic Forum, we are going through the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). 4IR will feature major technological advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, genomics, materials sciences, 3D printing, and more resulting in businesses, governments and civic institutions to collect, store and analyze data at an unprecedented scale, speed and depth. Public cloud computing is the engine that powers and enables the realization of these technological advancements and its adoption. With new rules/directives like the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) requiring all large companies to disclose their impact on people and the planet, it is only imperative that we don’t stop at only using cloud solutions to track emissions but also look at how to measure and reduce carbon emissions from our software and data footprint in the cloud.  "It’s time to start seeing software as part of the climate solution and not as part of the climate problem." ...