The art of simplicity

There's a specific kind of frustration familiar to anyone who's used an AI coding agent: you send a request, it starts running, and thirty seconds later you realize you forgot to add a critical constraint. Or you think of a follow-up. Or you can see it heading somewhere wrong, and there's nothing you can do but sit there and watch. That's been the workflow. One prompt, one response, wait, repeat. The February 2026 release of VSCode (1.110) changes this in a way that's simple to describe but surprisingly powerful in practice: you can now send messages while a request is still running. What's actually changed The new behavior covers two distinct scenarios. The first is mid-flight intervention : if Copilot is in the middle of generating a response and you realize it's going in the wrong direction, you can now type a corrective message immediately. You don't have to wait. The agent incorporates your guidance and adjusts course without restarting the se...

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: /delegate — handing off a task to the Copilot coding agent in the cloud, which works asynchronously on GitHub while you continue with other work 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 ch...

So far in this series we've covered modes, session management, and parallelization with /fleet . This post is about hooks — one of the more powerful features of Copilot CLI. Hooks let you inject your own shell scripts at key moments during a session, enabling everything from audit logging to blocking dangerous commands before they execute. What are hooks? Hooks are custom scripts that run at specific points during a Copilot CLI session. They receive structured JSON input describing what's happening at that moment — which tool is being called, what arguments it received, what the session context looks like — and can optionally respond with a JSON output that influences what Copilot does next. The key thing that makes hooks different from just writing good prompts or instructions: hooks are deterministic. They execute your code at specific lifecycle points with guaranteed outcomes. Unlike instructions that guide agent behavior, a hook can guarantee that a dangerous comman...

In the previous posts we covered the different CLI modes and session management. This time we're looking at one of Copilot CLI's most powerful features: the /fleet command. If you've ever wished you could clone yourself to tackle several parts of a codebase at once, this is the closest thing to it. What is /fleet ? When you send a prompt to Copilot CLI, by default a single agent works through the task sequentially. /fleet changes that model entirely. The /fleet slash command lets Copilot CLI break down a complex request into smaller tasks and run them in parallel, maximizing efficiency and throughput. The main Copilot agent analyzes the prompt and determines whether it can be divided into smaller subtasks. It then acts as an orchestrator, managing the workflow and dependencies between those subtasks, each handled by a separate subagent. In practice, this means a task that might take 20 minutes sequentially can complete in a fraction of the time — because independ...

In the first post we covered the different modes in Copilot CLI. This time we're looking at something that becomes essential once you're doing serious work in the CLI: session management. Sessions let you pause, resume, and organize your work — across terminal restarts, across machines, and across multiple concurrent workstreams. What is a session? Every time you launch Copilot CLI, you're working inside a session. A session captures your full conversation history, the tool calls Copilot made, the files it touched, and the permissions you granted — all stored locally under ~/.copilot/session-state/ . Sessions are identified by a UUID and automatically receive an AI-generated name based on your first message, making them easy to identify later. Most important is that sessions persist after you close the CLI. That means nothing is lost when you shut down your terminal — you can always pick up right where you left off. Resuming a session Pick up where you left off ...

Welcome to the first post in my series on getting the most out of GitHub Copilot in the terminal. We'll kick things off with one of the most important things to understand: the different modes Copilot CLI operates in, and when to reach for each one. A quick intro to GitHub Copilot CLI GitHub Copilot CLI is a terminal-native coding agent — not just a chat wrapper. It can plan complex tasks, edit files, run tests, and iterate autonomously, all without leaving your terminal. But to get the most out of it, you need to understand how to control how much autonomy you give it at any point in time. That's exactly what the different modes are for. You cycle through the main modes using Shift+Tab . A mode indicator in the CLI's footer tells you which one you're currently in. The three main modes 1. Standard Mode — The default When you launch copilot , you start in standard (interactive) mode. This is the classic back-and-forth: you submit a prompt, Copilot responds o...