Building an Emoji List Generator with GitHub Copilot CLI

In the GitHub team's Rubber Duck Thursdays live stream, they built an emoji list generator that turns bullet-point lists pasted into the terminal into related emoji and copies them to the clipboard.

The setup was simple. They built the terminal UI with @opentui/core, attached @github/copilot-sdk as the AI engine, and used clipboardy to copy the result to the clipboard. After entering a list, the user can press Ctrl + S to instantly get the converted result.

Development started in plan mode of GitHub Copilot CLI. They organized requirements with Claude Sonnet 4.6 to finalize the stack and libraries, going through clarifying questions in the process, which produced plan.md. They then proceeded with implementation using Claude Opus 4.7, completing a working terminal app in a short time.

The key features used were as follows.

• Organizing the design with Plan mode
• Proceeding with implementation using Autopilot mode
• Using models at each stage with Multi-model workflow
• Using the allow-all tools flag
• Integrating the GitHub MCP server

The project's source is freely available, and you can build a similar tool yourself by referring to the GitHub Copilot CLI and GitHub Copilot SDK documentation.