Slash commands in copilot cli and copilot cloud

[arqex]

Describe the feature or problem you'd like to solve

Custom slash commands should work in copilot cli and copilot cloud

Proposed solution

I have some custom prompts in .github/prompts that I can use in the VS code's copilot chat, but they don't work neither in the copilot cli or in the cloud.

If I use /review_pr 3211 in the vs chat, it reads .github/prompts/review_pr.prompt.md and follow the instructions. That doesn't happen in copilot cli or copilot cloud

Example prompts or workflows

/plan create a new controller
/review_pr 2341
/implement plan.md

Additional context

No response

[jakkaj]

I see there are agents present, but /prompts are more like one off commands that don't require a mode change. You might run a /prompt whilst being in a particular agent mode. And example might be /deepresearch and have it do some collection of data in parallel subagents then go off and do research using perplexity.

In the example below I ask for a research prompt that I can take and drop in to something like GPT pro or something. The flow here feels unnatural. Switch to agent, ask for the prompt. I should just go /deepresearch give me a prompt to research python blah...

I'm also pretty surprised that existing .github/prompts don't seem to work either...

[arqex]

One nice thing about the slash commands is that they accept arguments, we can pass some inputs directly through the prompt and then the commands are not a one-off thing anymore, they are kind of templates of how to work on something.

In our agentic workflows we are trying to get out the loop, and let agents work more independently without interacting, so it would be great if we could run these commands in the CLI or the cloud. We could delegate things like:

• /code_review <branch_name>
• /plan Create a new controller for users
• /debug Home button not working

All these commands generate reports that can be used at a later time, no need to interact with them. We also chain this kind of commands and one read the output of the previous. That's the reason we would like to see them working in copilot CLI, because we can run them programmatically in headless mode:

copilot -p "/plan Create a new controller for users"
copilot -p "/implement"

I'm a heavy user of claude code, and these kind of flows are so powerful. But at work we use copilot and we can't implement them just because copilot cli (or cloud) don't support the custom prompts.

[EvanBoyle]

We shipped /review and /plan this week!