Delegate bounded coding tasks to GitHub Copilot CLI and review

Copilot Delegate turns the GitHub Copilot CLI (copilot) into a separate implementer that an orchestrating agent or engineer can dispatch bounded coding work to. You write a brief, hand it to the bundled scripts/relay.mjs wrapper, and the relay runs copilot --output-format json --no-color --stream off -p @<brief.txt>, captures the full JSONL event stream, and writes a stable result.json. Copilot never commits its own work - the loop always ends with the orchestrator reviewing the diff and landing the commit. This is a docs-only import of the skill: the executable scripts/relay.mjs referenced throughout is not bundled here, so the full runtime has to be sourced upstream before the loop can run.

Use it when a task is bounded enough to hand off as a single brief and you want Copilot to do the typing while you keep review and landing responsibility, and only when the user has explicitly asked for delegation to this implementer. Do not use it when the task is small enough to finish inline (delegation overhead is not worth it), when the copilot CLI is not installed or authenticated, or when the work needs a hard sandbox: Copilot's own sandbox controls are upstream-experimental (MXC-based, off by default) and this relay does not configure them. --read-only only forces --mode plan, which disables edit tools - shell commands still run - so a genuinely isolated worktree is the only real guarantee against changes to project files.

The input is a brief: a standalone description of the goal, current state, what to change, what to leave untouched, the project's real test/lint/build gate commands, and a report contract, written to a file and passed as --brief. Optional flags choose --model <name> (letters, digits, and . _ : / - only), --effort <low|medium|high|xhigh|max>, --read-only for a plan-mode pass, --allow-all-tools for full tool autonomy, --timeout <duration> (default 30 minutes) as a watchdog, and --session <id> or --resume-last to continue a prior run. The output is result.json, carrying status (completed, failed, timeout, aborted, or copilot_unavailable), exitCode, sessionId, finalMessage (Copilot's closing report), and touchedFiles - a git status --porcelain snapshot of the working tree, not an attribution of exactly what Copilot itself edited.

Wraps the GitHub Copilot CLI, installed with npm install -g @github/copilot (the CLI itself needs Node 22+; the relay that drives it runs on Node 18+). Authentication is via copilot login (interactive) or by setting COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN, GH_TOKEN, or GITHUB_TOKEN in the environment. The relay needs a git repository as its working root, pointed at with --cd. Without --allow-all-tools, Copilot auto-denies tool calls in headless mode and the relay surfaces that as an explicit failed status with the CLI's own denial message, rather than silently doing nothing.

Orchestrating agents and engineers who already use the Copilot CLI as an implementer and want a scripted brief-dispatch-review-commit loop instead of manual copy-paste between sessions. The authorization model is explicit: delegation is something a human opts into, the orchestrator never accepts Copilot's self-report as evidence and re-runs the project's real gates itself, and anything touching credentials, production data, or irreversible operations stops for a human decision rather than being folded into a brief.