Jesse Liberty

In examining my HyperVideo project I decided that the Bunny video was a great placeholder, but what I really wanted was my own videos. What better place to start than the videos I have up on YouTube. How am I going to do that?

To get started, I asked CoPilot what it would take. CoPilot generated a plan of action. I took that and opened an issue on GitHub which will document what I have to do.

When working with CoPilot in Visual Studio, the single most important thing is context. Context tells CoPilot what it is working on, what it should already know, what language conventions to use, etc., etc. CoPilot wants to help, but its memory is not the best, and like the character in Memento, the trick is to write everything down and remind it all the time… hence context.

The best way to get ahead of this is to create a copilot-instructions.md file in your .github directory (which you may need to create). In this file, you’ll want to put anything that CoPilot should know right from the get-go and for every session.

But how do you know what to put in there?

This series on AI is going to take two paths:

• Writing prompts
• Writing apps that integrate AI (see Hypervideo)

If you are writing apps, you have a couple choices (well, more than a couple). One choice is to stay in the Azure/.NET world, in which case C# is just fine. The other (set of) choice(s) is to work in the rest of AI development, in which case Python is the language of choice.

I’m taking a course on agentics from Johns Hopkins University, and that course is in Python. It turns out that learning Python is pretty easy if you are a C# programmer, and it is even easier if you are a C# programmer with access to CoPilot and/or ChatGPT for Python.

I resisted learning Python all these years, but I’ve come to believe that if you are serious about AI then Python is in your future. So, might as well bite the bullet and get started now.

Every two years or so I publish a list of the utilities I find indispensable. It is interesting to me which ones last year after year (e.g., Evernote) and which fall off the list—often because the functionality I want has been absorbed into Microsoft software I’m already using.

Here is 2026’s list…