Introduction
Every week on the GitHub team’s Rubber Duck Thursdays live stream, we build projects together, cowork with our community, and answer burning questions. During a recent stream, we tackled a fun and practical challenge: creating an emoji list generator that saves you from manually picking emojis for social media posts, launch announcements, or any bullet list. The result is a terminal-based tool that uses the GitHub Copilot CLI to intelligently assign relevant emojis to your bullet points—and then copies the finished list straight to your clipboard.
What Is the Emoji List Generator?
If you’ve ever drafted a tweet or release post, you know the struggle: you want to add that perfect emoji next to each bullet point, but stopping to search for the right one breaks your flow. The Emoji List Generator solves this by letting you paste or type a list of bullet points in your terminal, press Ctrl+S, and instantly get a new list where each bullet is paired with a context-aware emoji—already copied to your clipboard. All the heavy lifting is done by AI, so you can stay in “move fast and break things” mode.
How We Built It
We combined three core technologies:
- @opentui/core – for the terminal user interface
- @github/copilot-sdk – the AI brain that suggests appropriate emojis
- clipboardy – for seamless clipboard access
With these in place, we turned to the GitHub Copilot CLI to accelerate development. Here’s how the process unfolded.
The Planning Phase
We started in plan mode using Claude Sonnet 4.6. We described our goal: “I want to create an AI-powered markdown emoji list generator. In this CLI app, if I paste in or write in some bullet points, it will replace those bullet points with relevant emojis and copy the result to my clipboard. I’d like it to use the GitHub Copilot SDK for the AI magic.”
Copilot responded by asking clarifying questions—about the tech stack, libraries to use, and how to handle edge cases. A special shoutout to community member Gabor, who suggested OpenTUI for the terminal UI. After a short back‑and‑forth, Copilot generated a detailed plan.md file, ready for us to review and execute.
Implementation with Autopilot
We then switched to autopilot mode running Claude Opus 4.7 (freshly released at the time). Copilot took the plan and wrote the code, integrating the chosen libraries and wiring everything together. A few minutes later, we had a working terminal UI.
During the build we leveraged several powerful features of the GitHub Copilot CLI:
- Plan mode to design the architecture before writing code
- Autopilot mode to let the AI implement the plan
- Multi‑model workflow (Claude Sonnet for planning, Claude Opus for coding)
- The
--allow-allflag to let Copilot run commands freely - The GitHub MCP server for deeper integration
These tools together made the development fast, fun, and collaborative.
Get Started Yourself
If you’d like to build a similar project, start by exploring the GitHub Copilot CLI documentation and the GitHub Copilot SDK. The emoji list generator itself is free and open source, so you can clone it, hack on it, or just use it directly.
Conclusion
This project proves that even a small, focused tool can showcase the power of AI-assisted development. By combining the Copilot CLI’s planning and autopilot capabilities with a few well‑chosen libraries, we built a practical utility in minutes—and had a great time doing it. Next time you see a beautifully emoji‑fied launch post, remember: you can create your own in seconds with Copilot.