Give Your AI Assistant Access to SDS Documentation
If you use an AI coding assistant — GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or a self-hosted LLM — you can give it access to the full Citrix Secure Developer Spaces™ (SDS) documentation so it can answer SDS-specific questions accurately and help you with SDS tasks.
The documentation is served directly from your SDS instance, so this works the same way in air-gapped and internet-connected environments. All documentation fetches stay on your network, and the documentation always matches your deployed SDS version.
Overview
Your SDS instance serves its own documentation in an AI-readable format based on the llms.txt standard. Two files make this possible:
-
llms.txt— a structured index of every documentation page, so your AI assistant can discover what is available and fetch the right page. -
llms-full.txt— the complete documentation corpus in a single file, for ingestion into a context window or a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system.
Both are reachable from inside your workspace and from any tool that can reach your SDS instance URL.
This guide walks through:
- Verifying the documentation is available from your SDS instance.
- Adding SDS context to your AI assistant.
- Testing that your assistant uses the documentation.
Before You Begin
- Know your SDS instance URL — the URL you use to log in to the SDS console (for example,
https://sds.mycompany.internal). - Use an AI assistant that supports system prompts or custom instructions.
Step 1: Verify the Documentation Is Available
In your browser, navigate to:
https://<your-sds-url>/docs/llms.txt
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You should see a structured list of SDS documentation pages. If this page loads, you are ready to continue. If it does not load, contact your platform administrator.
Step 2: Add SDS Context to Your AI Assistant
Add the following snippet to your AI assistant’s system prompt or custom instructions. Replace <your-sds-url> with your actual SDS instance URL.
You have access to documentation for Citrix Secure Developer Spaces (SDS), the cloud development environment I work in. In SDS, my code, IDE, and developer tools run in a remote, containerized workspace that I access from a browser or over SSH — not on my local machine.
This workspace IS a Citrix SDS workspace. Treat any reference to "my/this workspace," "my environment," "this machine/container," or my dev tooling as referring to SDS — even when I don't say "SDS" explicitly.
Documentation sources:
- Documentation index: https://<your-sds-url>/docs/llms.txt
- Full documentation corpus: https://<your-sds-url>/docs/llms-full.txt
How to answer SDS questions:
- Fetch the index first to find relevant pages, then fetch the specific page(s) for detailed answers. For a clearly SDS-related question, prefer this documentation over general knowledge.
- Cite the specific doc page(s) you used (title or URL) so I can verify the source. If you did not consult the docs for an SDS answer, say so.
- SDS workspaces are ephemeral. When advising on installing tools or changing the environment, check what persists and recommend an approach that survives workspace restarts.
Accuracy and uncertainty:
- Base SDS-specific answers on the fetched documentation. Clearly separate what the docs confirm from your own general knowledge or inference.
- If the documentation does not cover the question, or covers it only
partially, say so explicitly rather than filling the gap with assumptions.
- Do not invent SDS features, configuration options, URLs, CLI commands, API fields, or version numbers. If you are not certain a detail is in the docs, state your uncertainty and point me to the docs index or my platform administrator instead of guessing.
- This documentation matches my deployed SDS version. If your general
knowledge conflicts with it, the documentation wins. Flag any behavior that may depend on version, configuration, or admin-controlled settings.
- If you cannot reach the documentation URLs, tell me the fetch failed and do not answer SDS-specific questions from memory alone.
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Where to Add This Snippet
| AI Tool | Where to add |
|---|---|
| GitHub Copilot (VS Code) | Settings → Copilot → Custom Instructions, or .github/copilot-instructions.md in your repo |
| Claude Code | Add to CLAUDE.md in your project root, or ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for global |
| Cursor | Settings → Rules for AI, or .cursorrules file in your repo |
| Windsurf | Settings → Cascade → Rules |
| Self-hosted LLM (Ollama, etc.) | Modelfile SYSTEM directive, or pass as a system message in your client |
Step 3: Test It
Ask your AI assistant a clear SDS-specific question, for example:
“How do I configure a workspace template in SDS?”
The assistant should fetch the documentation and provide a specific answer with SDS terminology and concrete steps.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Possible cause | What to do |
|---|---|---|
https://<your-sds-url>/docs/llms.txt does not load |
Wrong instance URL, or docs endpoint not reachable from your network | Confirm the URL you use to log in to the SDS console. If it still fails, contact your platform administrator. |
| The assistant answers from general knowledge instead of the docs | Snippet not applied, or the tool does not auto-fetch URLs | Confirm the snippet is saved in the correct location for your tool. Ask the assistant to fetch the documentation index first. |
| The assistant reports it cannot reach the documentation URLs | Air-gapped tool without network access to the SDS instance | Ensure the AI tool runs where it can reach your SDS instance URL, or use llms-full.txt as pasted context. |