Ryan is joined by Jan Liphardt,  CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, to chat about the rapidly evolving world of humanoid robotics and what it means for humans, why OpenMind is building an open source operating system for robots that processes logic in natural language, and how putting Asimov’s Laws on the blockchain might be the key to robotics guardrails.

Tomorrow is Pi Day, and to celebrate, we’ve compiled some of the most interesting Raspberry Pi projects from around the world. It would be brilliant if you could take to the comments section to show us some of your spectacular builds — relying on just one person’s greatest-hits list (mine) is too big a burden to bear on such a momentous day.

British icons

If you visit the ‘For industry’ tab on our website, you’ll find loads of success stories explaining how Raspberry Pi hardware has provided a solution for an industrial challenge. One of my favourites has always been the Brompton case study, and it’s not just because the video shot is particularly lovely. Brompton’s folding bicycles are a British urban icon, and the fact that our tiny British-made computers are responsible for capturing data across their London factory is almost poetic.

Beaverheimer at MIT

2024 was a glorious year for Pi Day; Massachusetts Institute of Technology students recreated the film Oppenheimer with their beaver mascot in the lead role. I still can’t make sense of this celebration, so I’ll instead impart the interesting fact that a beaver was chosen as the mascot for the esteemed institute because the animal is thought of as “nature’s engineer”. Cute, right?

Pi measuring Pi

2023 was also a banner year for kooky celebrations. Apparently, some people celebrate Pi Day by measuring pi (π) with random objects. This was news to me when I stumbled across this fantastic post by Jim Hall, who had a go using a Raspberry Pi 3. All you need is some graph paper, a ruler, a pen, and one of our tiny computers. Hint: It’s to do with the mounting holes on our boards and their ability to help you draw a perfect circle.

It gets weirder still in the comments under the blog post I wrote about it. My head was spinning by that point.

Saving the ocean on the back of a turtle

The title pretty much sums it up. I know I mentioned this project on the blog recently, but I think it is my favourite ever. Arribada Initiative is responsible for developing this innovative solution while looking for a low-cost system to keep an eye on wildlife in complex environments without being too intrusive.

A Raspberry Pi Zero and one of our camera modules were enclosed in a lightweight, waterproof enclosure that attaches harmlessly to the shell of a sea turtle, capturing photos, video, and location data.

Teaching the next generation of engineers

It was pretty cool to learn that Cornell University’s entire Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course was built around RP2040, the chip featured on our Raspberry Pi Pico boards. Since our first (e-)meeting, we’ve kept in touch with the professor responsible, and each year they send us a playlist of all the (often fun and silly) projects the latest cohort of students has created. The 2025 round-up featured lovingly generated pixel art of cows and a lightly harrowing heat-seeking quadruped robot.

To the comments section!

Rather than me wittering on about my niche list of favourites, let us engage with one another and share our favourite Raspberry Pi builds from around the internet.

It doesn’t have to have featured on the official Raspberry Pi blog — it could be from the most random Reddit tab you’ve had open since 2022, with the intention of recreating it yourself or sharing it at an opportune moment… LIKE THIS ONE!

The post Celebrating Pi Day with some of your greatest hits appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

This week, we discuss Claude Code for non-coders, automating newsletters and status reports, and AI tax prep. Plus, Coté finds unexpected joy in a coding assistant.

Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 563

Runner-up Titles

• Upgraded to Max
• The only innovation I was talking about was hiring me.
• The Patrick Stewart of the Cubicles.
• Should we become the Claudecast?
• Matt Ray in Your Pocket.
• Come into the tent
• You have agency in your life

Rundown

• Coté went to Claude Camp
  • Microsoft and Anthropic team up to bring Claude Cowork to Microsoft 365
  • Cursor is rolling out a new kind of agentic coding tool
  • Hater Season: Corey Quinn — Better Offline
• Google completes acquisition of Wiz

Relevant to your Interests

• I Worked for Block. Its A.I. Job Cuts Aren’t What They Seem.
• Iranian news claims AWS drone strikes were deliberate
• Anthropic Just Won the Enterprise. Here’s What Nobody’s Talking About
• Amazon's Bahrain data center targeted by Iran for support of U.S. military, state media says
• Startups.RIP - Dead YC Startups, Alive Ideas
• Kratix Anywhere: Cloud, On-Prem, and Hybrid Without Compromise
• Meta just bought Moltbook, the social network for AI bots - 9to5Mac
• Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages
• Oracle is building yesterday’s data centers with tomorrow’s debt
• SUSE Reportedly May Be For Sale Yet Again
• When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry”
• Oracle is under pressure from more than $100 billion in debt and massive layoffs as it pushes ahead with Larry Ellison’s 3-step transformation
• Oracle is building yesterday’s data centers with tomorrow’s debt
• Oracle Job Cuts
• OpenAI bowed out of the Oracle
• MacBook Neo - Tech Specs
• Code Mode: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens
• MacBook Neo - Tech Specs

Nonsense

• McDonald’s C.E.O. Takes a Big Bite Out of a Burger. Maybe Scratch ‘Big.’

Conferences

• KubeCon EU, March 23-26, 2026 - Coté will be there on a media pass.
• DevOpsdays Atlanta 2026, April 21-22, 2026
• DevOpsDays Austin, May 5-6, 2026
• WeAreDevelopers, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking.
• VMware User Groups (VMUGs):
  • Amsterdam (March 17-19, 2026) - Coté speaking.
  • Minneapolis (April 7-9, 2026)
  • Toronto (May 12-14, 2026)
  • Dallas (June 9-11, 2026)
  • Orlando (October 20-22, 2026)

SDT News & Community

• Join our Slack community
• Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com
• Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com
• Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky
• Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok
• Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté
• Sponsor the show
• Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media

Recommendations

• Brandon:
  • Token management with RTK
  • Usage for Claude App - App Store
• Coté: Anker MagGo 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station

Download audio: https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/9b74150b-3553-49dc-8332-f89bbbba9f92/5f0a3e02-a9d5-418a-91b1-4365e1a45df6.mp3

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Adrian Peryer about Ron Westrum's organizational culture continuum, the role of information flow in shaping team culture, and how leaders can develop requisite imagination to detect weak signals.

By Adrian Peryer

We've covered modes, session management, parallelization with /fleet, and hooks. To close out the series, we're looking at delegation, the feature that lets you hand off work from your terminal to a background agent in the cloud, and build a network of specialized custom agents for your team.

Two flavors of delegation

"Delegation" in Copilot CLI means two related but distinct things:

1. /delegate — handing off a task to the Copilot coding agent in the cloud, which works asynchronously on GitHub while you continue with other work
2. Custom agents + /agent — routing tasks to specialized subagents tailored to specific types of work, running locally within your CLI session

Both follow the same principle: rather than one generalist agent handling everything, you route work to whatever agent is best suited for the job. Let's look at each in turn.

/delegate — Offload to the cloud

What it does

Running /delegate TASK-DESCRIPTION commits any unstaged changes to a new branch. After that, the Copilot coding agent opens a draft pull request, makes changes in the background, and then requests a review from you. Copilot provides a link to the pull request and its coding agent session in your terminal once this process begins.

In other words, /delegate is a fire-and-forget command. You describe the task, Copilot hands it off to a cloud-hosted agent on GitHub, and your terminal is immediately free.

When to use it

This is the right choice when:

• The task is well-defined enough that you don't need to steer it interactively
• You want to keep your local terminal unblocked for other work
• The output should be reviewed as a pull request anyway — features, fixes, refactors

It's less suitable for exploratory or ambiguous tasks where you'd want to guide the work as it progresses.

The & shorthand

You can also prefix any prompt with & to delegate work to the Copilot coding agent in the cloud, freeing your terminal for other tasks.

& "Add pagination to the /api/users endpoint and write integration tests"

This is the fastest way to offload a task without typing the full /delegate command.

Monitoring delegated work

Once /delegate or & fires, you'll get a link to the PR and the agent's session. You can track progress directly on GitHub, or pull the session back into your local CLI with /resume — you can kick off a Copilot coding agent session on GitHub and then use Copilot CLI to bring that session to your local environment. This gives you a seamless handoff in either direction: delegate from CLI, monitor on GitHub, and resume locally if needed.

Custom Agents — Building a team of specialists

What custom agents are

A custom agent is a specialized version of Copilot. When you prompt Copilot to carry out a task, it may choose to use one of your custom agents if Copilot determines that the agent's expertise is a good fit for the task. Work performed by a custom agent is carried out using a subagent — a temporary agent spun up to complete the task. The subagent has its own context window, which can be populated by information that is not relevant to the main agent. In this way, especially for larger tasks, parts of the work can be offloaded to custom agents without cluttering the main agent's context window.

Defining a custom agent

Each custom agent is defined by a Markdown file with an .agent.md extension. You can create these manually or use an interactive wizard inside the CLI.

A basic agent file looks like this:

---
name: Security Auditor
description: Reviews code for security vulnerabilities, OWASP issues, and credential exposure
tools: [agent, edit, search, todo]
---

You are a security-focused code reviewer. When asked to review code, you check for:
- Hardcoded credentials or secrets
- SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities
- Insecure dependency versions
- Missing input validation

Always explain your findings clearly and suggest a concrete fix for each issue.

Save it as .github/agents/security-auditor.agent.md and it's immediately available in your CLI session.

Where to store agent files

You can define custom agents at the user, repository, or organization/enterprise level. The three locations are:

• ~/.copilot/agents/ — personal agents available in every session, on every repo
• .github/agents/ — repo-level agents committed to a specific repository
• {org}/.github repository — org-wide agents available to everyone in your GitHub organization

In the case of naming conflicts, a system-level agent overrides a repository-level agent, and the repository-level agent overrides an organization-level agent.

Invoking custom agents

There are several ways to trigger a custom agent:

Explicit invocation with /agent: Enter /agent in interactive mode and choose from the list of available custom agents, then enter a prompt that will be passed to the selected agent.

Tell Copilot which agent to use:

Use the security-auditor agent on all files in /src/app

Launch with --agent flag:

copilot --agent security-auditor --prompt "Review /src/app/program.cs"

This is useful for scripting and automation, where you want to guarantee a specific agent is used.

Automatic delegation

One of the most powerful behaviors: the AI model can choose to delegate a task to a subsidiary subagent process that operates using a custom agent with specific expertise if it judges that this would result in the work being completed more effectively. The model may equally choose to handle the work directly in the main agent.

This means you don't always have to explicitly invoke agents. If your prompt matches the description of an available agent well enough, Copilot will route to it automatically. The user-invocable property in an agent file controls whether Copilot considers it for manual delegation — set it to true if you want an agent that can be invoked directly from the UI.

Combining delegation and /fleet

As touched on in the previous post, custom agents and /fleet work well together. When /fleet breaks a large task into parallel subtasks, each subagent can use a different custom agent based on the nature of its work. For example, a task that involves both writing new code and auditing existing code could have its subtasks routed to a developer agent and a security-auditor agent respectively — running concurrently.

An agent setup example

Here's what a well-organized custom agent roster might look like for a typical product team:

• security-auditor.agent.md: OWASP checks, credential scanning, input validation review
• code-reviewer.agent.md: Style, patterns, test coverage, complexity
• docs-writer.agent.md: README updates, API docs, inline comments
• test-writer.agent.md: Unit and integration test generation, coverage gaps
• k8s.agent.md: Kubernetes YAML generation, optimization, validation

Stored in your org's .github repository, these agents become available to every developer in your organization — a shared team of specialists that anyone can invoke, and that Copilot can route to automatically.

Wrapping up the series

Delegation is the final piece of the Copilot CLI puzzle — it's what lets you move from a single-agent, single-task workflow to a team of specialists working in parallel, asynchronously, and in the cloud. Combined with the modes from post 1, session management from post 2, /fleet from post 3, and hooks from post 4, you now have the full picture of what Copilot CLI can do.

The through-line across all five posts is the same idea: Copilot CLI gives you fine-grained control over how much autonomy you give the agent at each stage of your work. From reviewing every step in standard mode to firing off a delegated PR with & and walking away — the right level of autonomy depends on how well-defined the task is and how much you trust the result. Get that calibration right, and Copilot CLI becomes a genuine force multiplier.

VS Code 1.111 Autopilot is not just a no-prompts mode. In testing, it handled a blocking question that still stopped Bypass.