GitHub Copilot now has an SDK!
From the announcement blog post:
Building agentic workflows from scratch is hard.
You have to manage context across turns, orchestrate tools and commands, route between models, integrate MCP servers, and think through permissions, safety boundaries, and failure modes. Even before you reach your actual product logic, you’ve already built a small platform.
GitHub Copilot SDK (now in technical preview) removes that burden. It allows you to take the same Copilot agentic core that powers GitHub Copilot CLI and embed it in any application.
This gives you programmatic access to the same production-tested execution loop that powers GitHub Copilot CLI. That means instead of wiring your own planner, tool loop, and runtime, you can embed that agentic loop directly into your application and build on top of it for any use case.
You also get Copilot CLI’s support for multiple AI models, custom tool definitions, MCP server integration, GitHub authentication, and real-time streaming.
I’ll have more to say in an upcoming post, but the fact that platforms like Claude, GitHub Copilot, et al. have SDKs explodes the optionality in agentic coding. You can embed these frameworks into bespoke tooling along with their built-in extension mechanisms, like skills, and MCP. In a past life, I used to make the argument that “scripting” languages were high leverage because they intentionally supported both embedding and extending.
As an old Lisp weenie, I definitely comprehend that there are limits on the utility of extreme environment customization. For solo developers, it’s a win. For teams and organizations that need consistent, shared development practices, it’s a challenge. Letting a thousand flowers bloom is wonderful until you have to transfer standards and expertise between developers.
One angle of deep interest, though, is the rapid creation of domain-specific platforms for niche, high-expertise audiences.
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