Introduction
Every week, the GitHub team hosts Rubber Duck Thursdays, a live stream where we build projects, collaborate with the community, and answer questions. In a recent episode, we created a fun and practical tool: an emoji list generator powered by the GitHub Copilot CLI. This article walks you through the project and shows how you can build your own version.
What Is the Emoji List Generator?
Have you ever seen social media posts that use bullet points with emojis to highlight features? For example:
- 💻 Works in the CLI
- 🤖 Uses Copilot SDK to intelligently convert bullet points to relevant emojis
- 📋 Copies the result to your clipboard
It looks great, but manually choosing the perfect emoji for each bullet point can be slow. The Emoji List Generator solves this. It runs in the terminal and lets you paste or type a list, then with a simple Ctrl+S it replaces your bullet points with appropriate emojis and copies the final list to your clipboard.
How We Built It
We combined several modern tools to make this project quickly:
| Component | Technology | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal UI | @opentui/core | Provide a clean, interactive interface in the command line |
| AI Brain | @github/copilot-sdk | Intelligently match emojis to text |
| Clipboard Access | clipboardy | Copy results directly to clipboard |
Step-by-Step Development
Planning with Copilot CLI
We started by opening the GitHub Copilot CLI in plan mode (using Claude Sonnet 4.6). The prompt was:
I want to create an AI-powered markdown emoji list generator. Where, in this CLI app, if I paste in or write in some bullet points, it will replace those bullet points with relevant emojis to the given point in that list, and copies it to my clipboard. I'd like it to use GitHub Copilot SDK for the AI juiciness.
Copilot asked clarifying questions—for example, about the tech stack and which libraries to use (shoutout to community member Gabor for suggesting OpenTUI). It then produced a complete plan.md file for us to review.
Implementing with Autopilot Mode
We used the generated plan with autopilot mode (Claude Opus 4.7, recently released). Within minutes, we had a fully functional terminal UI.
Key Features Used from GitHub Copilot CLI
- Plan mode – Helped design the architecture interactively
- Autopilot mode – Executed the plan autonomously
- Multi-model workflow – Switched between different AI models as needed
allow-all-toolsflag – Gave the agent permission to use external tools- GitHub MCP server – Enabled access to GitHub APIs from within the CLI
How to Build Your Own Version
You can easily recreate this project. Start by reading the GitHub Copilot CLI documentation and the GitHub Copilot SDK guide. Then, follow the planning step above, adapt the code to your needs, and you'll have your own emoji list generator in no time.
Conclusion
The Emoji List Generator is a small but mighty project that demonstrates how you can combine terminal UIs, AI, and clipboard utilities with the GitHub Copilot CLI. The source code is open source and free for anyone to use. Happy building!