GitHub Copilot CLI, driven from your phone

Copilot is the agent where the identity question is worth asking before you start, and it is a question about the computer rather than about Happier. The CLI resolves whichever GitHub identity that box already has — a gh auth login someone did months ago, or a token exported for CI — and that is the identity the agent acts as when it touches a repository. Happier does not hold a GitHub identity of its own for it and does not substitute one.

That is not a guess, it is how the check is implemented. Happier reads COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN, then GH_TOKEN, then GITHUB_TOKEN, and if none of them is set it asks the GitHub CLI for a token — so the answer on the provider page is the answer Copilot will get. It is deliberately per-computer, and GitHub’s own documentation is the reason: signing in on your laptop does not sign you in on the build box, and the page says which one it is talking about. GitHub also puts an active Copilot subscription in the prerequisites for the CLI, so if the agent stops with a subscription error, that is the vendor’s gate and not ours.

The thing that is easy to miss, and the thing worth having on a phone: your skills come with it. SKILL.md bundles under .github/skills in the repository and ~/.copilot/skills on that computer are discovered as prompt assets, so the instructions you wrote for Copilot at your desk are in force in a session you started from a train. Tools go the other way — Copilot does not take MCP servers directly, so the ones you defined in Happier reach it through the happier tools shell bridge, as commands rather than as inventory, and the app shows you which surface a session got before it starts.

GitHub ships a Copilot agent for the command line that works against a repository the way the other CLIs here do, on the Copilot entitlement you already have. happier copilot runs that binary under your GitHub identity.

Because it is a terminal program, the computer it runs on does not have to be the one you are looking at. Happier keeps the session readable and answerable from a phone, a browser tab or the desktop app while the repository stays put.

The iOS and Android apps, the desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, and app.happier.dev are all clients onto the GitHub Copilot CLI process running on your computer — not read-only mirrors. Answer a permission request, send the next instruction, browse the repository, read the diff. The transcript is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your computer, so the server carrying it holds ciphertext.

Happier installs on the computer that already holds your repository, and happier copilot starts GitHub Copilot CLI there as an ordinary subprocess, in the directory you point it at, signed in the way you signed it in. There is no gateway between the agent and GitHub, and no copy of your source anywhere else.

Happier looks for copilot on your PATH first and runs the copy you installed. If there is not one, it can install @github/copilot into ~/.happier/tools/providers/copilot/ — its own directory, not your global npm prefix. A copy you manage yourself is never replaced or upgraded behind your back.

GitHub’s own page for GitHub Copilot CLI is at docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/set-up/install-copilot-cli. Happier does not mirror it, because a copy of someone else’s install instructions is a copy that goes stale.

Configuration reference for the Happier side — GitHub Copilot CLI in the Happier docs.

GitHub Copilot CLI is one of 13 command-line coding agents Happier runs, and they share one session list, one permission inbox, one set of keyboard shortcuts and one MCP configuration.

You define an MCP server once, and because GitHub Copilot CLI does not consume MCP directly, Happier hands the same tool surface to it through the happier tools shell bridge instead — the same tools, delivered as commands it can run. The app previews the effective tool surface before a session starts, so which one you got is visible rather than inferred.

That matters most on the days you are running more than one: sessions from different vendors side by side, and a notification tap opening the session that raised the request rather than the app’s front door. The full list is here.

Typing happier copilot in a terminal starts the session right where you are standing, and the same session is in the app at the same time. What you read in that shell is Happier’s own display of the session — the transcript, the permission prompts, the tool output — rather than GitHub Copilot CLI’s interface. Nobody has to give up the terminal to get a phone client.

There is no hand-off to GitHub Copilot CLI’s own TUI. That exists for Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, and for GitHub Copilot CLI the session stays Happier’s on both ends. happier attach <session-id> lists the sessions on that computer and marks the ones it cannot reattach, rather than failing after you pick one.

The attach guide lists the cases instead of promising all of them.

One command on the computer that holds your code, then happier copilot in the repository you want to work in.

Walkthroughs are in the guides. All of it is MIT-licensed, and the relay is one you can run yourself.