copilot-cli

copilot-cli is a skill for Claude Code from amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills. It costs 91 tokens per session (1,938 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool for handing large coding tasks to GitHub Copilot CLI, a command-line program that can work on a codebase in a separate session.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for multi-file features, migrations, refactors, test suites, architecture exploration, dependency mapping, and code reviews.
Why use it?
It provides a separate context for lengthy implementation, codebase exploration, research, and review work.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents; mentions OpenCode.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills/copilot-cli
Any agent
npx skills add amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills --skill copilot-cli
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for copilot-cli

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills/copilot-cli.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills/copilot-cli)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills/copilot-cli"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills/copilot-cli.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,938 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00091 $0.01938
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.00969
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00388
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00194

Measured 6d ago against content hash c4cd6e00f065, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

copilot-cli scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

  • gemini-cli — 86% identical, 79 lines differ
  • kiro-cli — 80% identical, 75 lines differ
skills/copilot-cli/SKILL.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

GitHub Copilot CLI (subagent/task delegation)

Use GitHub Copilot CLI to run a separate long-horizon pass over the repo: multi-step implementation, broad refactors, batch file writes, or deep exploration—similar to handing a task to a subagent. You stay orchestrator: smaller prompts, less context burn, often lower spend than doing the same work entirely in-session.

Inside Copilot CLI, agents are specialists. Force one using the --agent flag in non-interactive prompts. Core specialists include explore, general-purpose, task, research, and code-review.

When to use Copilot CLI

  • Large or multi-step work: several files, phases, or checkpoints (feature slice, migration, test suite, docs sweep).
  • Heavy code generation or editing: Copilot drives --yolo tool use while you summarize outcomes and merge.
  • Parallel mental lane: you continue planning or reviewing while Copilot runs a bounded task (optionally background—see reference.md).
  • Built-in specialists: explore for architecture / dependency mapping; general-purpose for heavy multi-file subtasks with isolated context; code-review for review-style analysis.
  • User explicitly asks for Copilot or “use Copilot for this.”

When not to use

  • Small / single-step tasks answerable with one or two edits or a short explanation.
  • Tight feedback loops where the user wants rapid back-and-forth refinement in one thread.
  • Secrets or policy-sensitive flows—avoid piping credentials; redact before delegating.
  • Already-loaded context where duplicating the whole plan adds no value—handle locally.
  • Low ROI (Return on Investment): If the task is "needle-in-a-haystack" (requires high precision over a single line) or if the time to compose the Handoff Table exceeds the time to simply edit the file locally. Delegation should only be used when the "mental offloading" outweighs the "handoff overhead."

Delegation and context (critical)

Isolated subagent context saves tokens but splits the story: Copilot does not see your full thread. Poor handoffs cause misread subtasks, conflicting assumptions (stack, style, APIs), and wasted edits—see Cognition’s discussion of sharing context and implicit decisions in multi-step setups.

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 117 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A c4cd6e00f065

Subscribe to this mod's changes

copilot-cli is a skill published in the GitHub repository amirkiarafiei/subagent-cli-skills (5 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 1,938 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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