GitHub Copilot CLI

What hackers pick instead

• Cursor CLIDevelopers recommend it as a capable terminal agent that matches mainstream rivals, with good limits for $20 a month and easy model switching.17recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 109 comments. Each links to the original.

1. I tried the CLI, and for some reason it was much better. I explain carefully what I want, and it iterates until it's done, quickly, on cheap models.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Eight More Months of Agents”

2. The team's been working really hard to improve the harness, and we're taking as much community feedback as we can get!

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns”

3. Copilot will keep working until it fulfills your request, no matter how many tokens it uses.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “The AI Vampire”

4. The Copilot CLI team has been making great strides towards improving our agentic harness!

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “The Agentic AI Handbook: Production-Ready Patterns”

5. It's pretty good, for my purposes at work it's probably as good as Claude Code.

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

6. The mentioned ability to easily call on various models in the same prompt

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilot”

7. Teams where I work can use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Copilot CLI.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Ask HN: Is vibe coding a new mandatory job requirement?”

8. Been having a ton of fun with copilot cli directed to local qwen 3.6

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual Plans”

9. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing”

10. Copilot CLI is worse than Claude Code, but not by a huge amount.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?”

11. which has got much better over the past few months

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Microsoft Drops Claude Code After Budget Overrun”

12. Copilot's harness and the underlying Claude models are not well-matched compared to the vertically-integrated Claude Code harness.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6”

13. found it now provided a degraded experience because Microsoft unanimously decided to change some part of it without my consent

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open”

14. After the recent changes to usage, I've spent an annoyingly long number of hours trying to get this to work.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Running local models is good now”

15. copilot cli became even more unusable than claude pro subscription around January/February

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “GitHub removed the old copilot multipliers on a pricing page”

16. The env command is part of a hard-coded read-only command list stored in the source code.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot CLI Downloads and Executes Malware”

17. It shouldn't be able to just do `env sh` and run whatever it wants without approval.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot CLI Downloads and Executes Malware”

18. Why even have any user confirmations at all if the LLM can just bypass them at will?

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot CLI Downloads and Executes Malware”

19. Claude Code has something special that Microsoft doesn't have in Github Copilot CLI

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

20. So GH Copilot restricts curl, but not if it's run with `env` prepended.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot CLI Downloads and Executes Malware”

21. GitHub's Copilot CLI is nice enough; now it is not as well-packaged as Claude Code, but I like being able to use their harness in my emulator of choice

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage–so they're making up tasks”

22. But this is not true, the author gave explicit permission on copilot startup to trust and execute code in the folder.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot CLI Downloads and Executes Malware”

23. my experience has been great with copilot cli, but yeah there is some memory leaks here and there and slowness

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Migrating the GitHub Copilot Runtime to Rust, Using Copilot”

24. It works well, handles sub-agents without issue and does a reasonable job operating in the Copilot ecosystem.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing”

25. after seeing how the microsoft ai engineers on copilot-cli handle session continuity (major respect to them)

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Show HN:`npx continues` – resume same session Claude, Gemini, Codex when limited”

26. find that to be more limiting and it's only really worth using if you are paying for GitHub Copilot

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI”

27. Like it is a legit CLI tool but we should ignore it because it shares the name with something else?

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Anthropic acquires Bun”

28. it's a nice option to have available if you have a Copilot Business/Enterprise plan at work

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Claude Code can debug low-level cryptography”

29. the Copilot CLI works 4x better than the Copilot VSCode extension at actually writing code

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

30. Copilot CLI usage has been greater than Claude Code usage at Microsoft for several weeks

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Microsoft Drops Claude Code After Budget Overrun”

31. It was interesting to see the Copilot CLI agent interpreting an ask to load test a URL

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Build an agent into any app with the GitHub Copilot SDK”

32. I find GitHub Copilot CLI (and now also the new GitHub Copilot app) quite decent.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Microsoft Drops Claude Code After Budget Overrun”

33. This is the way. I use gh copilot and have opus interrogate me and write the plan

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “When I reject AI code even if it works”

34. Perhaps Copilot CLI is close enough, and the CC product doesn't justify the cost

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Microsoft Drops Claude Code After Budget Overrun”

35. Copilot cli isn’t as good as Claude but it’s not just fancy autocomplete either.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “What Is Copilot Exactly?”

36. it's actually pretty effective, at least more effective than Copilot+VSCode

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft”

37. the copilot cli adoption in the last 2 weeks is spreading light wild fire

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Time Is Different”

38. Microsoft offer better agent coding with VScode and Github copilot cli.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “SpaceX and Cursor partnership. Right to acquire Cursor later this year”

39. The Copilot CLI has ushered in the beginning of a change in this dogma

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Microsoft Drops Claude Code After Budget Overrun”

40. Copilot CLI normal chat exposes output tokens only; input is estimated

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Copilot-arewecooked – Know your AI credit cost before June first”