GitHub Changelog, Now in Your Terminal (Built with Copilot CLI)

This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge.

What I Built

gh-changelog - A GitHub CLI extension that shows the latest updates from the GitHub Changelog.

Demo

My Experience with GitHub Copilot CLI

I kicked off the project with a straightforward prompt: build a GitHub CLI extension in Go that surfaces the latest updates from the GitHub Changelog. Within minutes, I had a working prototype that fetched real data and did exactly what I asked. That "time-to-something-useful" was genuinely impressive.

Where things fell a bit short initially was polish - layout, output formatting, and some of the CLI ergonomics I care about. That wasn’t a limitation of Copilot so much as a reflection of how broad my early prompts were. I asked for something functional, and that’s exactly what I got.

From there, I made use of the /delegate command to kick off other agent tasks resulting in a PR for each bit of visual polish and features like:

• Adding relative dates and an ID column
• Adding a view command to view changelog entries individually in terminal
• Adding an open command to view changelog entries in a browser

What I learned / what was reinforced

• Copilot is incredibly good at getting you to "something useful" fast
• Quality of output maps directly to quality of prompts
• Treating Copilot like a junior collaborator (not a magic wand) works well
• Agent-style delegation maps surprisingly well to small, reviewable PRs

If you live in the terminal and want to stay current with GitHub updates, give it a try:

gh extension install leereilly/gh-changelog
gh changelog

Check it out and give it a ⭐️

leereilly / gh-changelog

A GitHub CLI extension to view the latest GitHub Changelog entries directly in your terminal.

gh-changelog

A GitHub CLI extension to view the latest GitHub Changelog entries directly in your terminal.

Built using GitHub Copilot CLI for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge.

Installation

gh extension install leereilly/gh-changelog

Usage

View recent changelogs

gh changelog

Example output:

ID      TITLE                                                                                       UPDATED
#0      GPT-9000-Codex is now available in Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and Emacs                 Today
#1      GitHub Copilot Chat learned sarcasm (enable with COPILOT_SASS=true)                         2 days ago
#2      CodeQL 13.37 as been released                                                               3 days ago
#3      1 vCPU Linux runner now generally available in GitHub Actions                               4 days ago
#4      GitHub Copilot CLI: Plan before you build, steer as you go                                  5 days ago
#5      Install and Use GitHub Copilot CLI directly from the GitHub CLI                             5 days ago
#6      CodeQL 2.23.9 has been released                                                             6 days ago
#7      Strengthen your supply chain with code-to-cloud traceability and SLSA Build

…

View on GitHub

Note: I'm a GitHub employee, so I'll rule myself out of any prizes. I'd still love the participation ribbon tho'!