Let me tell you about last Thursday, when I was ankle-deep in a legacy Django migration, you know the kind, the one with missing foreign keys and a test database that flaked out on the wrong commit. I stopped for a coffee, flicked open the terminal, and remembered: GitHub just lobbed Copilot right into my command line. Not just code, but natural language prompts. No switching context, no wrestling with a GUI. Just ask it what you need, like spelling out a grocery list to a mate.
For years, GitHub Copilot has lived inside your editor, whispering code suggestions as you type. But on September 25, 2025, they rolled out Copilot CLI in public preview, and it does more than suggest code, it listens to plain English, builds, edits, debugs, and refactors, all from your terminal[1]. The thing ships with GitHub’s MCP (Model Context Protocol) server out of the box, and you can plug in your own if you’re feeling adventurous[1]. It also ties right into your repos, so no more copy-pasting paths or hunting for the right branch.
What Changed
- Natural language commands directly in the terminal, no GUI, no browser tabs.
- It’s not just code completion, think of it as a Swiss Army knife for your whole workflow, from git wrangling to debugging.
- Built-in GitHub integration, so it knows your project as well as you do (maybe better, after two espressos).
- Agent mode lets you delegate tasks: “show me all the failing tests in this branch” or “convert these CSV files to JSON.”
- Extensible via custom MCP servers, if you have proprietary tools or data sources[1].
Why It’s Useful
Take the average Monday morning: You’ve got a stakeholder chasing a hotfix, your CI pipeline’s throwing a tantrum, and your stand-up starts in ten minutes. Copilot CLI means you can skip the ritual of googling arcane Bash flags or scraping through Stack Overflow. Just tell it what you need. “Find all the slow database queries in the last deploy and show me the logs.” Done. Or, “Upgrade all the Python dependencies in this project, but skip the ones pinned for security.” No more context-switching, no fiddling with mouse clicks. Just type what you’d say out loud.
For a data analyst, this could look like: “Pull the last month’s sales data from our Postgres warehouse, clean it, and spit out a summary CSV.” For a dev ops lead, “Give me a list of all the Lambda functions running in prod right now, sorted by memory usage.” It’s not just about saving keystrokes. It’s about cutting out the friction that turns simple tasks into 45-minute yak shaves.
Oddly Specific Reality Check
Here’s a thing you’ll recognise if you’ve ever tried to explain automation to a non-technical client: The demo works, the client nods, then they ask for “just one more tweak” six times. Copilot CLI won’t solve that, but it will let you ship those tweaks faster, so you can get back to the actual work.
A year ago, automating this stuff meant writing shell scripts or duct-taping together Zapier and some Python. Now, you just ask. The catch? It’s still your code in the end. Copilot CLI doesn’t replace your judgement, just the grunt work. And honestly, that’s a fair trade, like having a sharp apprentice who doesn’t mind the late shifts.
