From trial and error I had suspected that having particular files open would help with context. I was also directly prompting (both in the chat window and inline comment) "use the open file ..." but nice to see I don't have to directly specify that. Thanks for the examples and straightforward presentation.
In my case something I have been doing is writing examples of the input and outputs expected of a method/function as comments (part of the function documentation). Copilot picks it up and generates a method that works many times. And the method is then well documented as well, as a bonus.
For small one-off scripts like this Copilot works. For real projects though there needs to be proper information what Copilot understood about that project and which files it has processed to gain that information. We have lots of configuration files for e.g. linters as well as naming standards, plenty of additional rules for the structure of code, comments etc. (which can't be defined in a configuration file but have separate tests). It's completely unclear if Copilot understands any of that, sometimes I get good suggestions while working in a file, in many cases the code though is really subpar (too basic, too different etc.). Why not chat with Copilot on initialization in a project to give it more context? If it is unsure about something (e.g. naming of variables, methods etc. in the project), Copilot could just ask the user and then present it's understanding in a tab or rather a new configuration file which could be synced to other devs.
Ah, interesting observation re naming standards. I think it'd be worth experimenting with explicit instructions at the top of file like "This file follows the naming conventions from standards.txt" and opening "standards.txt" at same time. It'd be great if you didn't have to provide that, but I suspect that right now Copilot isn't getting all that context.
I feel the lack of languages, but as many, open the files base that I need to use, give copilot a good context, buuut... it take a bit of time to copilot get what you are trying to do. I talking about PHP by the way. Hope some day this could improve.
