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Global instructions.md AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md documentation clarification #3983

Description

@dylbarne

Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve

Provide clear documentation about default behavior of Global instruction md files utilization

Proposed solution

Provide clear documentation about default behavior of Global instruction md files utilization

This will avoid confusion for end users

There is currently some documentation around this (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-cli/customize-copilot/add-custom-instructions#agent-instructions) although seems to be slightly unclear/inaccurate in comparison to observed behavior of CLI

example (running on Windows os, WSL Ubuntu):
running /env:

Image

however, I only have AGENTS.md in ~/.agents and CLAUDE.md in ~/.claude

additionally for the above, a nice enhancement with respect to release notes of version 1.0.26 - 2026-04-14 "Avoid sending duplicate custom instruction files (e.g. copilot-instructions.md and CLAUDE.md with identical content) to reduce wasted tokens per turn", it would be nice here on the /env to demark as "(duplicate)" label suffix or something equivalent there to alleviate user concerns that these may bloat context/instructions sent and that they are properly being de-duplicated by copilot harness

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