GitHub Copilot CLI - A Claude Code Alternative?

Another day, another agentic cli 😅

GitHub Copilot has released their coding agent like Claude Code in public beta.

👉 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-25-github-copilot-cli-is-now-in-public-preview/

Right now, it is pretty basic version with access to reading/writing files & bash and it has support for custom MCP - And don’t expect much from it.

One thing that bothers me is that GitHub MCP that comes by default(and currently you can’t disable it permanently 🙈) - So it just eats away your available context forcefully.

This matches with official GitHub MCP 👉 https://github.com/github/github-mcp-server

You can disable it for a session by running the following command though

/mcp disable github-mcp-server 

And the source code is closed as well.

How to get started?

You can install this from npm

npm install -g @github/copilot

Once you’ve installed it, login with your GitHub account.

And start using it like how you use Claude Code or other agentic CLI.

Happy AI-assisted coding!