GitHub Copilot CLI Gets GPT-5 Mini, Specialized Agents in Major Update

Rongchai Wang
Jan 14, 2026 20:42

GitHub rolls out GPT-5 mini and GPT-4.1 models to Copilot CLI alongside four specialized agents for code review, planning, and automated testing.

GitHub has shipped a substantial update to Copilot CLI, adding GPT-5 mini and GPT-4.1 models that won’t count against premium request limits for paid subscribers. The January 14 release also introduces four specialized agents designed to handle discrete development tasks without cluttering your main conversation context.

The new agents—Explore, Task, Plan, and Code-review—each tackle specific workflows. Explore handles fast codebase analysis for quick questions. Task runs builds and tests, returning brief summaries on success but full output when things break. Plan maps out implementation by analyzing dependencies. Code-review focuses on surfacing genuine issues rather than nitpicking style preferences.

What’s actually useful here: Copilot now delegates to these agents automatically when it detects an appropriate task, and can run multiple agents in parallel. Combined with the Agent Skills feature GitHub launched in December, developers can chain agentic workflows directly from their terminal.

Installation Gets Simpler

GitHub has added package manager support across platforms. Windows users can run winget install GitHub.Copilot, while macOS and Linux users have Homebrew (brew install copilot-cli) or a curl script option. Package manager installations handle automatic updates—no more manual version bumps.

The CLI now comes pre-installed in GitHub Codespaces and works as a Dev Container Feature for standardized dev environments.

Context Management Improvements

Token management gets smarter with auto-compaction that kicks in at 95% of the limit, automatically compressing conversation history. The new /context command shows exactly where your tokens are going, while /compact lets you manually compress when needed.

Session continuity improves too—the --resume flag now lets you tab through both local sessions and remote Copilot coding agent sessions.

Pipeline Integration

New flags target CI/CD use cases. --silent suppresses logs for clean parseable output. --share-gist exports sessions to shareable gists. Tool allowlisting and denylisting via --available-tools and --excluded-tools give granular control over what Copilot can access in automated environments.

A new web_fetch tool retrieves URL content as markdown, with access controlled through config file patterns that also apply to shell commands like curl and wget.

The diff viewer now includes intra-line syntax highlighting and integrates with Git’s configured pager. Agent-run commands no longer pollute your bash history—a small quality-of-life fix that matters during long debugging sessions.

Update via your package manager or run npm install -g @github/copilot@latest. The public repository at github.com/github/copilot-cli hosts ongoing discussion.

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