Cynthia Teeters cynthiateeters

Writing markdown files for AI assistants

Builds on concepts from Introduction to Markdown.

Markdown files serve a dual purpose when working with AI coding assistants: they're human-readable documentation AND machine-parseable instructions. This tutorial explores the design considerations most users overlook.

The invisible audience problem

When you write a README.md, you think about human readers. When you write a .github/copilot-instructions.md, you're writing for an AI that will interpret your instructions. But here's what many users miss: the AI reads your markdown differently than humans do.

Markdown learning (2026-01-20 14:30Z)

User (2026-01-20 14:30Z)

I need to know how to write markdown

HAP's Color Learning Lab - Design Rules Guide

1. HTML Structure & Patterns

Core HTML Template

DOCTYPE: HTML5 with lang="en"
Head Elements Order:
1. Meta charset and viewport

Title with consistent pattern: "HAP's Color Learning Lab - [Station Name/Description]"

Lighthouse Analysis & Improvement Plan

from your JSON audit

1. Summary: Strengths & Weaknesses by Category

Category	Strengths	Weaknesses / Opportunities
Performance	• FCP (First Contentful Paint) ~1.8 s (score ~0.89) oai_citation:1‡Gist • LCP ~1.8 s (score ~0.98) oai_citation:2‡Gist • No HTTP → HTTPS issue (site is local) oai_citation:3‡Gist • Viewport meta is correct (“width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0”) oai_citation:4‡Gist	• Room to reduce render-blocking CSS/JS • Potential unused CSS or JS • Optimizing critical path to further lower FCP/LCP • Further improve time to interactive and reduce total blocking time
Accessibility	• Some

🌍 Assignment: Lighthouse Report for "About Me"

🧭 Overview

In this assignment, you’ll measure how your “About Me” website performs using Chrome’s built-in Lighthouse tool. You’ll generate a report, publish it using Netlify Drop, and submit the public URL.

Typically, this would serve as a baseline for future improvement in performance, accessibility, and best practices. The point of this assignment is to give you experience with Lighthouse for code that you already know.

Note: Your "About Me" site deploy may have been deleted by Netlify but your GitHub repo should still be there.

Phenomenal Woman

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies. I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size
But when I start to tell them, They think I’m telling lies. I say, It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,

How to Correctly Open a Pull Request (PR)

This guide explains why and how students must link Issues to their Pull Requests, and how to get instructor review efficiently.

⸻

Why This Matters • Issue linkage: Writing Closes #<ISSUE_NUMBER> in your PR description automatically connects the PR to the Issue. When the PR is merged, the Issue will close. • Instructor notification: Adding @cynthiateeters ensures your instructor sees the PR promptly. • Validation: Running the local validator before pushing helps avoid failed checks.

Troubleshooting User-Level MCP in VS Code (Windows Focus)

This guide centers on the single most efficient way to configure Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers—especially Context7—in user scope on Windows, without touching workspace settings.

1. Use MCP: Open User Configuration

The MCP: Open User Configuration command automates locating or creating your user-level MCP file and opens it directly:

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html lang="en">

	<head>
	<meta charset="UTF-8">
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
	<title>Visual Story Project - Midterm</title>
	<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
	</head>

	{
	"lighthouseVersion": "12.8.1",
	"requestedUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:5500/index.html",
	"mainDocumentUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:5500/index.html",
	"finalDisplayedUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:5500/index.html",
	"finalUrl": "http://127.0.0.1:5500/index.html",
	"fetchTime": "2025-10-04T01:03:53.076Z",
	"gatherMode": "navigation",
	"runWarnings": [],
	"userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/140.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",