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GitHub Copilot Setup for Defra

Practical setup guidance for configuring GitHub Copilot in Defra projects — agents, instructions, skills, prompts, and cross-tool configuration.

LAP Implementations Skills — Examples for GitHub Copilot

Legacy Application Modernisation (LAP) Skills are reusable capability packages that agents discover and load automatically. Unlike Instructions (which are always injected) or Agents (which you invoke explicitly), a Skill activates itself when Copilot decides it is relevant to the current task — based on a short description you write in the skill file.

Skills follow the Agent Skills open standard (opens in new tab) and work across multiple AI coding assistants — not just GitHub Copilot.

Available examples

Skill Purpose
LAP Innovation Architecture Reasoning Propose a target architecture and an incremental migration plan that is achievable and reversible.
LAP Innovation Incremental Refactoring Implement one approved migration slice safely in a factory-compatible way small, reviewable, reversible, and fully tested.
LAP Innovation Intelligent Application Migration Implement one approved migration slice safely in a factory-compatible way small, reviewable, reversible, and fully tested.
LAP Inovation System Discovery Build an accurate, evidence-based map of the current system (structure, flows, dependencies, data)
LAP Innovation Test Synthesis Create a safety net that protects current behaviour and supports incremental modernisation.

The following skills are available as ZIP downloads. Extract each archive into your repository’s .github/skills/ directory.

Skill Download Purpose
LAP Innovation Architecture Guidance Download ZIP Guidance for creating architecture outputs during LAP modernisation.
LAP Innovation Cloud Tier Requirements Download ZIP Cloud platform and service-tier requirements for LAP architecture work.
LAP Innovation Curate Transcript Download ZIP Curate transcript content for evidence-based LAP analysis.
LAP Innovation HTML Pack Download ZIP Produce an HTML documentation pack from LAP analysis outputs.
LAP Innovation Image to HTML Download ZIP Convert supplied images into HTML material for LAP analysis.
LAP Innovation Infrastructure Diagram Download ZIP Create infrastructure diagrams from evidenced LAP architecture requirements.
LAP Innovation Validate Mermaid Download ZIP Validate Mermaid diagrams used in LAP documentation and architecture outputs.

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All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0, except where otherwise stated