Copilot agent ignores instructions for inital planning commit.

[bHimes]

Select Topic Area

Bug

Copilot Feature Area

Copilot Agent Mode

Body

Statement

When operating GH copilot in agent mode starting from assigning it to a review, I do not want the project CI to be run for every update as we iterate through solutions in the PR it creates.

Partial fix

Adding explicit instructions to include [skip ci] to every commit message works for all commit messages created by the agent except the first one. This reduces the CI burden, but it would be great if the inital commit message also honored this instruction.

Details of attempted solution

I have the following in in .github/workflows/copilot-instructions.md

Commit Messages

Always add [skip ci] to the end of all commit messages, including the initial plan for issue, when making commits in this repository. This prevents CI workflows from being triggered unnecessarily when changes are made by Copilot.

Example commit message format:

Initial plan for issue [skip ci]

or

Add feature X [skip ci]

or

Fix issue Y [skip ci]

This instruction applies to all forks of this repository.

As this was not sufficient, I also added .github/workflows/copilot-instructions.yml (per ghcp chat rec) with the following:

commit_message_guidelines: |
All commit messages (including the initial commit for an issue or PR) must end with [skip ci] to prevent CI from running. This applies to every commit, including 'Initial plan for issue'.

[obryckim]

I am seeing the same behavior.
I've added the copilot-instructions.md file in the repo with specific instructions on commit messages.

Yet, when assigning an issue to copilot and it creates a PR with an initial commit, the commit message does not follow our guidelines.

[adambirds]

Its a real ballache having to go manually rebase the branch to remove this commit.

[chrisvander]

Yeah, I use conventional commits, and do not want this commit to be included in the history.

[DevDengChao]

I'm using squash and merge to solve this.