7.2. Safeguards and Troubleshooting
💡 First Principle: Safeguards are configurable filters that catch risky output (matching public code, insecure patterns), and troubleshooting is the discipline of remembering that when Copilot goes quiet, the cause is almost always configuration (exclusions, policy, support limits) — not an outage.
Why this matters: the exam pairs "apply safeguards" with "resolve issues." You need to know what duplication detection and security warnings do, and how to reason through a developer's "Copilot isn't working" complaint.
The mental model: a quality gate plus a checklist. The gate (filters) stops bad output; the checklist (troubleshooting) walks the likely causes when expected behavior is missing — starting with settings, not assuming a defect.
⚠️ Common Misconception: "If Copilot stops suggesting, the service is broken." Missing suggestions are usually caused by exclusions, disabled policies, unsupported file types, or context limits. Troubleshooting starts with configuration, not an outage assumption.
