Module 1 · Foundations — what GitHub Copilot is Lesson 3 of 15
The screen: where every control lives
A tour of the interface you will live in — grey ghost text in the editor as you type, an inline chat where you type in the code, a side chat panel, and comment-triggered actions inside a pull request. Every panel has a reason to exist, and half of them are the difference between a chat and a system.
The concept
The interface of GitHub Copilot is grey ghost text in the editor as you type, an inline chat where you type in the code, a side chat panel, and comment-triggered actions inside a pull request. That sentence is worth slowing down on, because the single biggest cause of bad output is not a bad prompt — it is a good prompt typed into the wrong place.
The history list is your memory of what worked. Name your conversations. The temporary or private mode is for anything you would not want in an account's history. The settings panel holds the personal instructions that apply to everything, which is where your context belongs rather than repeated at the top of every message.
Do this once, properly: turn completions off for an hour and write one function by hand. Fluency in your own editor is the thing the tool is meant to speed up, not replace.. It takes fifteen minutes and saves you those fifteen minutes every week after.
Worked example
The ghost text is the part most people start with, and the pull-request review is the part that changes how a team works.
Your practice task
Spend fifteen minutes doing nothing but clicking. Open every panel, rename one conversation, and save one setting you will want again. Fluency with the screen is what stops you re-explaining yourself every session.
Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.
Key takeaway
The interface of GitHub Copilot is grey ghost text in the editor as you type, an inline chat where you type in the code, a side chat panel, and comment-triggered actions inside a pull request.
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