Copilot¶
The Copilot adapter is partial, and deliberately so. Every row in it was
confirmed by a real copilot run or a real log on 1.0.83; nothing was read
off a bundle or a doc page. Where no probe has run, the adapter answers "no"
rather than guessing, and this page says which is which.
Use it when you want a Copilot profile deployed and reported alongside your other agents. Do not expect the hooks that shape a Claude Code session to shape a Copilot one.
[profiles.gh]
agent = "copilot"
config_dir = "~/.copilot-gh"
roots = ["~/code/scratch"]
Hook events¶
Eleven event names are encoded. They are camelCase, and the list is what survived trying sixteen candidates against the binary — the five that were rejected are absent from the adapter rather than encoded hopefully:
preToolUse, postToolUse, postToolUseFailure, preMcpToolCall,
permissionRequest, sessionStart, sessionEnd, preCompact,
notification, subagentStart, subagentStop.
Three events the harness leans on do not exist: stop, postCompact and
userPromptSubmit. Every built-in that needs one of them installs nothing on a
Copilot profile — among them stop-verify-guard, engram-persist and
session-export. lh deploy names each omission as it writes the profile.
What a hook can decide¶
One verdict, one shape: a top-level {"permissionDecision": "deny",
"permissionDecisionReason": …} with exit 0. Any other verdict raises rather
than being approximated.
additionalContext is not emitted. It is unverified on this binary, so
context-inject and every other context-injecting hook has no effect on a
Copilot session. This is the single largest practical gap.
Tool operations¶
The tool map has two entries: bash → run_command and view → read_file.
There is no modify_file mapping, because no tool has been observed editing
a file. And view's argument key was never measured, so a ToolCall's reads
comes back empty — the mapping exists but is inert. lh doctor's Hook
operations section reports both facts.
What the harness writes¶
| Path | Note |
|---|---|
$COPILOT_HOME/hooks/lazy-harness.json |
Ownership is by filename, inside a glob directory |
$COPILOT_HOME/copilot-instructions.md |
The system doc destination |
copilot-instructions.md is the first destination that is not a repository
filename. AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md and
.github/copilot-instructions.md are all discovered by Copilot inside a
repo, never loaded from a config dir — writing one there installs nothing,
which is exactly the distinction
ADR-043
exists to make.
instructions/**/*.instructions.md is a second claimed destination and is
not returned. It is a glob, not a path, and system_docs() asserts the
agent loads every entry it returns. Two entries would be a claim about stacking
that nothing has measured.
No MCP servers are placed. mcp_config_file() is empty and plan_config
does not plan one. lh doctor surfaces this rather than hiding it — e.g.
· copilot/mcp: 3 detected servers not placed — adapter exposes no MCP target.
What the harness cannot do yet¶
| Surface | State | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Metering | not implemented | No TranscriptReader. Transcripts exist at session-state/<uuid>/events.jsonl and are self-identifying, so lh doctor's Transcripts section reports them as unread |
lh run --bypass |
error on all three levels | No probe has measured a bypass flag; inventing one from a help page would put an unmeasured permission grant in front of an unexercised argument parser |
| Skills | no root | No positive-and-negative discovery probe exists yet |
| Credentials | n/a |
Measured: auth survived every throwaway COPILOT_HOME, so the credential is not under the config dir at all |
| Logs directory | not declared | ~/.copilot/logs/ exists on disk, but the binary was never seen writing it |
That last row is the adapter's discipline in miniature: a directory that exists is not a directory the binary writes, and naming it would put a possibly-stale path in front of a reader.
Design record¶
ADR-047
records the adapter and the evidence rule behind it. The outstanding probes —
including the one that would settle the system_docs stacking question — are
listed in specs/designs/copilot-evidence.md and
specs/gates/probes/copilot-probe1.sh.