A terminal prompt with tool version numbers lined up neatly

Environment manifests for AI assistants across every repo

TL;DR I added a standardized environment.instructions.md file to every repository in my workspace. It’s a simple Markdown table of tool versions plus a few workflow snippets. AI assistants pick it up automatically, and they’ve stopped suggesting commands for tools or versions I don’t have. The whole thing took less than an hour to write out and propagate. The problem I run GitHub Copilot heavily across several projects — homelab infrastructure, a blog, a few Python services, and some supporting tooling. The AI context setup (those copilot-instructions.md files I wrote about here) covers what each project does and what its conventions are. What it doesn’t cover is what I’m actually running when I type commands in a terminal. ...

March 1, 2026 · 8 min · zolty

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