Rubber Duck Thursdays - Creating a brickbreaker walkthrough
Chris live-codes a GitHub-themed brick breaker game walkthrough using Copilot agent mode, demonstrating how prompt framing and context shape AI-generated code. The session covers bootstrapping project structure from an existing Game of Life template, Copilot custom instructions, and the latest GitHub changelog including enterprise rulesets, Copilot edits in JetBrains, and dependency label improvements.
In this episode, Chris sets out to build an educational walkthrough — similar to an existing Conway’s Game of Life sample — but for a brick breaker game styled with GitHub’s contribution graph colors. Using Copilot agent mode, he bootstraps the project structure by referencing the Game of Life walkthrough as context, then iterates on lesson pages focused on teaching prompt engineering for agent mode. The live coding demonstrates key concepts: how vague prompts produce incomplete results, how adding specific requirements (responsive containers, keyboard and mouse controls, bouncing physics) improves output, and how Copilot custom instructions (including a fun “talk like a pirate” experiment) modify agent behavior. Chris also briefly showcases the OctoSnap arcade concept and discusses ideas for making brick breaker use GitHub contribution data for brick colors and scoring. The changelog segment covers Mistral Small 3.1 in GitHub Models, upcoming GitHub Actions cache service changes, Copilot edits in JetBrains IDEs, enterprise custom properties and rulesets going GA, and Maven dependency labeling in the dependency graph.
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