Question

A developer is editing a partially written function in the IDE. Their cursor sits in the middle of the function body, with meaningful code both above and below the cursor. They notice that Copilot's inline suggestions seem to account for the lines that come after the cursor, not just the lines before it. When the Copilot client assembles the prompt for this completion request, how does it incorporate the code surrounding the cursor?

Accepted Answer

It uses both the code before the cursor (prefix) and the code after the cursor (suffix) via a fill-in-the-middle technique so the model can generate contextually consistent completions.

Answer

It sends only the text before the cursor, because language models can generate tokens exclusively from left-to-right preceding context.

Answer

It ignores the current file entirely and relies only on neighboring open tabs to infer what belongs at the cursor position.

Answer

It sends the entire repository as context so the model always has full visibility into every file when completing at the cursor.