🚀LeadPilot – Your AI Staff Engineer in the Terminal

This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge

Tagline:
“Because not everyone has a Staff Engineer reviewing their PR at 2AM.”

What I Built

LeadPilot is a tiny CLI that turns your local git diff into an actionable code review using GitHub Copilot CLI-right from your terminal.

Instead of waiting for PR reviews (or context-switching to a web UI), I wanted something I can run immediately while coding-especially for quick “sanity checks” before committing, pushing, or opening a PR.

What it does

• One command: leadpilot review
• Two review personas:
  • Startup CTO Review (default): pragmatic, shipping-focused, highlights the biggest risk + one improvement
  • FAANG Staff Engineer Review: stricter, architecture/scalability oriented, includes score + approval decision
• Branch-aware diffs: compare against any git ref via --branch (e.g. --branch master, --branch origin/main)
• Terminal-friendly output: clean, boxed formatting that’s easy to skim

If you’ve ever thought “I wish a senior engineer could look at this real quick”… LeadPilot is that, on-demand.

Why I built it

Code reviews are amazing… when you can get them.

But in real life:

• You might be working solo, late at night, or in a small team.
• Your teammate might be asleep (or in meetings) when you’re about to ship.
• Sometimes you don’t need a full PR discussion-you just want a quick, high-signal check.

LeadPilot is designed for that moment: fast feedback, in the terminal, on the diff you’re already looking at.

How it works (high-level)

LeadPilot keeps the workflow intentionally simple:

• It computes the diff you care about using git diff <branch> (default origin/main).
• It wraps that diff in a prompt tailored to the persona you chose (startup or faang).
• It asks GitHub Copilot CLI to review it via the copilot command (prompt-in, review-out).
• It prints the result in a clean, boxed format so you can skim it quickly.

This approach makes it easy to use in any repo without extra setup beyond having git + copilot available.

Demo

Repo: https://github.com/longphanquangminh/leadpilot

Quick start (global install)

From the LeadPilot repo:

npm install
npm i -g .

Suggested walkthrough

1/ Open any git repository.
2/ Make a small change (uncommitted is fine).
3/ Run a pragmatic review against master:

leadpilot review --branch master

4/ Flip personas to get a stricter review:

leadpilot review --mode faang --branch master

5/ Show the boxed output and discuss whether you’d “ship it” or iterate.

What you guys should do in your trials

• A diff that’s ~10–100 lines (enough to be interesting, small enough to review live)
• The Startup CTO output (biggest risk + one improvement)
• The FAANG output (score + approval decision)
• A quick branch switch (--branch origin/main vs --branch master) to show it’s flexible

Screenshots:

My Experience with GitHub Copilot CLI

GitHub Copilot CLI was my “pair reviewer” while building LeadPilot:

• It helped me iterate fast on prompts so each persona produces consistent, scannable sections (instead of a wall of text).
• It was great for UX pressure-testing: what output is actually actionable in a terminal (and what’s just noise).
• It made it easy to loop on edge cases (no diff, wrong refs, setup issues) because everything stays in the command line.

What I liked most is how natural it felt to keep everything in the terminal: edit → diff → review → refine.

What I learned

• Constraints create clarity: forcing the Startup CTO persona to return “ship decision + biggest risk + one improvement” makes the review immediately usable.
• Different personas are surprisingly helpful: the strict mode is great for architecture/design issues; the startup mode is great for “what could blow up in production tomorrow”.
• Terminal output matters: boxing + consistent headings makes it feel like a real tool, not just AI text pasted into your console.

What I’d improve next

• Async reviews for very large diffs or slower machines (queue the job, stream output, or provide a progress indicator).
• More modes (e.g., “Security reviewer”, “Performance reviewer”, “DX reviewer”) while keeping outputs structured.
• Context knobs (optionally include commit messages, file paths only, or a summary first).