Every week, the GitHub team runs a stream called Rubber Duck Thursdays, where we build projects live, cowork with our community, and answer questions!

This week, we built a very fun project together using the GitHub Copilot CLI! Let me tell you about it.

💡 New to GitHub Copilot CLI? Here’s how to get started.

What is it?

In a lot of social media tweets and launches, you often see accounts post things like:

We shipped the most amazing emoji list generator ever. It:

💻 Works in the CLI
🤖 Uses the Copilot SDK to intelligently convert your bullet points to relevent emoji
📋 Copies the result to the clipboard

It’s beautiful. But coming up with the perfect emoji is far too slow for me in this “move fast and break things” world. I have projects to build! Repos to vibe! Pull requests to merge! I can’t be thinking about emojis!

And thus, on the stream, we build an emoji list generator (very descriptively called Emoji List Generator) that:

🖥️ Runs in the terminal
📋 You paste or write a list
⌨️ You hit Ctrl + S
📎 You get the list on your clipboard

(Can you tell I’m dogfooding the product here?)

How we built it

We used a few cool technologies for this project:

🖥️ @opentui/corefor the terminal UI
🤖 @github/copilot-sdkfor the AI brain
📋 clipboardyfor clipboard access

To start the project off, we opened up the GitHub Copilot CLI.

In plan mode using Claude Sonnet 4.6, we wrote:

I want to create an AI-powered markdown emoji list generator. Where, in this CLI app, if I paste in or write in some bullet points, it will replace those bullet points with relevant emojis to the given point in that list, and copies it to my clipboard. I'd like it to use GitHub Copilot SDK for the AI juiciness.

Copilot asked me a bunch of clarifying questions, for example around the tech stack and what libraries we should use (shoutout to Gabor in the chat for suggesting OpenTUI), and from there, we had a fully thought-out plan.mdfile for me to review and use!

We implemented the plan using Claude Opus 4.7 (which was recently released!) and a few minutes later, voilà, we had a fun little terminal UI to work with!

The project was small but mighty. In the CLI, we used some really cool tools all together:

📋 Plan mode
🤖 Autopilot mode
🔀 Multi-model workflow
🚩 The allow-alltools flag
🐙 The GitHub MCP server

If you’d like to build a project like this yourself, you can check out the docs for the GitHub Copilot CLI and the GitHub Copilot SDK today!

The emoji list generator is free and open source, just for you.

Happy building!

The post Building an emoji list generator with the GitHub Copilot CLI appeared first on The GitHub Blog.

Copilot agents are easy to pilot.

Across organizations, teams are building agents to automate tasks, surface insights, and streamline everyday work. Early results are positive—and encouraging. One agent leads to another. Interest spreads. Adoption grows.

Then a different question starts to surface:

What happens when Copilot agents move beyond experiments and start to scale across the organization?

That’s where things are getting more complicated.

When success creates a new problem

In early stages, conversations about Copilot agents focus on how to build, with questions centering on tools, prompts, and connectors. As usage expands, the challenge shifts away from delivery and toward coordination.

Organizations see signals like:

• Multiple teams building agents independently
• Overlapping use cases with different risk profiles
• Unclear ownership as agents move into shared workflows
• Hesitation around approving the next agent

These aren’t failures. They’re signs that agent usage is becoming meaningful enough to require intent, especially at an enterprise level.

Why scale changes the conversation

As Copilot agents move from isolated experiments to shared enterprise capability, the conversation shifts. The challenge is no longer just how to deliver agents, but how—and which—agents the organization should operate at scale.

That shift introduces tradeoffs that rarely appear during pilot phases:

• How much autonomy should teams retain?
• Where does consistency start to matter?
• How should we support experimentation without creating fragmentation?
• How can leadership stay aligned as impact grows?

Without a shared way to reason through these decisions, choices begin to outpace clarity.

This is where many IT and business leaders pause. Not to stop innovation, but to ask a more fundamental question: 

What does “scaling well” actually look like for us?

A CIO‑level framework for deliberate scale

Organizations that recognize themselves at this inflection point will want to read Microsoft’s Accelerator article, A CIO framework for scaling Copilot agents—a CIO‑level perspective designed for when agent adoption begins to scale.

The framework explores:

• What changes as agents move from pilots to enterprise capability
• How leadership decisions evolve with scale
• How to balance flexibility with coherence
• How to guide growth before friction sets in

It’s framed for CIOs and senior IT leaders who are thinking beyond approving the next agent build, who are focusing now on aligning teams, expectations, and operating models at scale.

👉 Read the full framework on Microsoft 365 Accelerator

Discussion 

• What signals tell you it’s time to move from experimenting with agents to planning for scale?
• Where does agent growth create the most tension in your organization today?
• What’s the one decision you wish had been clearer earlier in your agent journey?

Microsoft 365 Accelerator is where planning conversations go deeper.
If your organization is moving from “can we build this?” to “how do we scale this responsibly?”, Accelerator is where you want to go next.

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's pedestrian performance on the Dwarkesh Podcast 2) Jensen's argument about competing chipmakers 3) Jensen's argument about China export controls 4) What Jensen should've said 5) Why Jensen is in a tough place when he does these interviews 6) Mythos seems real btw 7) Anthropic is talking with the government about a peace deal 8) Alex's interview philosophy 9) Sam Altman's conflicts of interest 10) Are OpenAI investors considering replacing Sam as CEO? 11) Wait, Allbirds is a GPU company now??

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