Hidde de Smet
Azure Architect at Xebia · Microsoft MVP
Hidde de Smet is an Azure Architect at Xebia in the Netherlands, and a dual Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies and Azure. As a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), he helps organizations design and govern cloud infrastructure with Bicep, Terraform, and Azure Landing Zones, while exploring how agentic AI tools like GitHub Copilot are reshaping software delivery.
He writes regularly on AI agent instruction files and spec-driven development at hiddedesmet.com. A frequent speaker at conferences, meetups, and community events across the Netherlands and Belgium, Hidde brings hands-on experience from large-scale client engagements into practical, opinionated talks on cloud architecture and AI-assisted engineering.
Why is your AI agent ignoring the instructions you just wrote?
copilot-instructions.md, AGENTS.md, SKILL.md, prompt files — they all tell the agent how to behave. So why does one get followed immediately while another disappears into the void? A practical mental model for how AI instruction files are actually loaded and applied — and how to spot guidance that is being ignored versus never loaded.
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