GitHub's team built a working emoji list generator live on stream using 3 libraries: @opentui/core for the terminal UI, @github/copilot-sdk for AI processing, and clipboardy for clipboard access. The tool takes bullet points, replaces them with contextually relevant emojis via the Copilot SDK, and copies the result to your clipboard on Ctrl+S. The entire plan was generated in Copilot CLI's plan mode using Claude Sonnet 4.6, then implemented with Claude Opus 4.7, released April 16, 2026.
What's worth reading here is not the emoji tool itself. It's the workflow: a single natural-language prompt to Copilot CLI triggered clarifying questions, produced a structured plan.md file, and then drove implementation with a different model suited for code generation. Community member Gabor surfaced OpenTUI as the UI library during the live session, and it made the cut. The whole pipeline from prompt to working terminal app ran in minutes.
This documents a concrete, repeatable pattern for CLI app development using the GitHub Copilot SDK as the AI layer. The stream is timestamped and linkable. If you build terminal tools or want a live example of Copilot CLI's plan mode in practice, the original post includes the exact prompt used and a screenshot of the finished output.
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