GitHub Copilot CLI
Models from three vendors inside one program; Plan and Autopilot modes, memory across sessions.
How to check: Open the Copilot pricing page on github.com from the corporate network without a VPN: if the subscription activates, you have access.
Verified: Sep 12last change: Sep 28next price check: Dec 11
Facts with sources
- Opened to all Copilot subscribers on February 25. Source (in Russian)
- Purchased by 56% of teams, used daily by 14% (LeadDev, 2026). Source (in Russian)
- A budget approved in Q1 at the rates of the time was outdated by June because the pricing model changed. Source (in Russian)
Strengths
- Models from five vendors in one window: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Kimi and Microsoft MAI; auto mode picks one and gives a 10% discount.
- Pro at $10 a month undercuts Codex, Claude Code and Cursor, and includes access to the Claude Code and Codex agents (Byte & Beyond).
- Rubber Duck: code written by Claude Haiku 4.5 was reviewed by a different vendor's model, GPT-5.6 Terra, in Microsoft's live demo.
- Plan mode (Shift+Tab) asks clarifying questions and writes plan.md without touching code; /fleet hands plan items to subagents in parallel.
Weaknesses
- In Microsoft's own demo the ToDo Sweeper app built in 20 minutes did not work, and the speaker ended the talk without a fix.
- Since 2026-08-20 billing is metered by token and annual plans are gone; AI Credit spend is shown only inside the session.
- Autopilot grants every permission and loops until it decides it is done; the speaker recommends it only in a sandbox.
- The instructions file and MCP servers fill the context window on every launch; unused MCPs have to be disabled by hand via /mcp.
Example from practice
A TODO scanner in 20 minutes on the VS Live stage
Kayla, a Senior Dev Advocate at Microsoft, spent 20 minutes building ToDo Sweeper in Copilot CLI, a scanner for TODO and FIXME comments in a repository. She switched to Claude Haiku 4.5 for speed, enabled YOLO, ran /init, answered Plan mode's clarifying questions, then launched Autopilot and /fleet so the plan's eight items ran in parallel. The build finished, but the scanner hung on the Windows Terminal repo, a rebuild did not help, and it was still broken when the talk ended. /diff, /review and Rubber Duck were shown on the broken code.
source: Microsoft Developer, "Fast Focus: Dream a Little Dream: Dev with the CLI"
What reviewers say
Reviewer opinions on their own tasks and hardware, not measurements. Links go to the videos; transcripts live in docs/raw-data.
- Fast Focus: Dream a Little Dream: Dev with the CLI · Microsoft Developer, Aug 18A Microsoft speaker presents Plan, Autopilot, /fleet, /context and Rubber Duck as a complete terminal toolkit; the demo app itself did not work.
- Codex vs Claude Code vs Cursor vs Copilot – Best AI Coding Agent in 2026? · Byte & Beyond, Aug 31Without running any code, the author sees Copilot as the path of least resistance for GitHub-centric teams: $10 for Pro and several models and agents in one subscription.
Who it is for
- Team already living in GitHub and a Copilot subscription
Models in this agent
Score is from our manager-task benchmark; models without a score are not measured yet.
What changed
- Claude Sonnet 5.5 is generally available in GitHub Copilot – aimed at well-scoped everyday work like building features and fixing bugs →
- GitHub Copilot code review resolves its own comments after the feedback is addressed and suggests commit messages when its fixes are applied →
- GitHub Copilot app added Jira integration: issues enter a shared canvas with context for investigation, implementation and pull request preparation →
- MAI-Code-1-Flash retired across GitHub Copilot; the suggested replacement is MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, which Enterprise admins may need to enable in model policies →
- GitHub Copilot moved to metered token billing and dropped annual plans; a budget approved in spring is out of date →
- GitHub Copilot CLI opened to every Copilot subscriber
How to brief an agent like this
The four-line brief is the Foundation module: prompt structure, LLM agents and MCP, an AI policy for the team. It starts with the free open module.