📄 CodeCompanion Filewise extension

[dyamon]

This is a set of three CodeCompanion extensions that try to add support for custom instruction, prompt and chatmode files from VSCode/Copilot.

From the README

codecompanion-filewise.nvim is a CodeCompanion extensions plugin that brings file-aware AI assistance to your workflow.
It enables advanced customization of instructions, modes, and prompts on a per-file or per-context basis, making your AI interactions smarter and more relevant to your project.
This plugin aims at providing full compatibility with instruction, prompt, and chatmode Markdown files used by VS Code, making it easy to share and reuse your AI workflows across editors.

[...]

Custom instructions are added to the context either manually by the user (using the provided commands) or automatically on a configurable set of triggers.
Custom prompts and chat modes are turned into custom prompts in your prompt library:

• modes are turned into prompts that will replace the default system prompt and are available in the prompt library using the :CodeCompanionActions command.
• prompts are turned into prompts appearing both in the prompt library and as slash commands in chat.

The "custom instructions" plugin is heavily inspired by the great "CodeCompanion Rules" #1718 but supports globs and conditional includes via applyTo YAML field.

I guess this is somewhat similar to the new "memory" feature, but these extensions aim to provide full compatibility with VS Code customization approach

[dyamon]

Incidentally, is there a way to inject context (or more in general modify the chat content) before submitting it to the agent/llm?
What i mean is having a custom function that somehow is called on the request payload before sending it to the appropriate endpoint?

This would make context injection easier (instead of "patching" slash commands) and might be useful in other situations (e.g., some sort of local codegate to remove sensitive info from the chat).

[einarpersson]

I agree that a pre-hook would be preferable!

[minusfive]

Yeah, it'd be great if this was supported natively. E.g. https://github.com/github/spec-kit would be fully supported, right?

[dyamon]

I took the time to look at spec-kit a bit since it was on my radar anyway. In principle it is supported, i.e., using the copilot template will provide some prompt file that my extension will load as custom project prompts. Still I'm not sure about one think: every *.prompt.md file generated by the specify tools starts with

The user input to you can be provided directly by the agent or as a command argument - you **MUST** consider it before proceeding with the prompt (if not empty).

User input:

$ARGUMENTS

...

Looking at this I would assume that, in VS Code, whatever comes after a slash command is also injected in a prompt with this "environment variable". To be clear, this feature is UNDOCUMENTED and I don't see a straightforward way to implement it in CodeCompanion. As always micro$oft comes up with crappy design decisions:

• this is clearly not an environment variable but for whatever reason they are using env var syntax.
• there is already variable substitution in prompts (supported by my extension) but they decided to go with a different syntax because who cares about consistency.

I guess the prompt will run anyway and guess the right think, but it might be wise to tweak it a bit to remove this crap at the beginning of the file. If it were documented, I'd be keen to find a way to support it, but this feels like playing whac-a-mole with whatever stupid idea some microsoft dev comes up with after their morning coffee.

About supporting .github/prompts/*.prompt.md files natively I would suggest @olimorris against it. I feel like every agent provider is coming up with their own crazy way to inject customization into a chat and deciding to go with one early on could result in the inability to pivot later on. I suggest you keep using the extension if you like it, and any feedback would be invaluable.

Also sorry for the ms flame but it needed to be said.

[minusfive]

What you're referring to is actually a Claude feature which seems to be becoming a de facto standard:

• https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/claude-code-best-practices#:~:text=Custom%20slash%20commands%20can%20include%20the%20special%20keyword%20$ARGUMENTS%20to%20pass%20parameters%20from%20command%20invocation.

[dyamon]

Interesting, thanks for the link. Now that I know what we are dealing with, I opened an issue for the extension (dyamon/codecompanion-filewise.nvim#2). I guess we can try and find a way to support this after all.

[olimorris]

Great job and thanks for sharing!