copilot-cli-essentials

A GitHub Copilot CLI plugin providing essential GitHub delivery and maintenance workflows — agents and skills for CI/CD, releases, security, incidents, and team operations.

Install

copilot plugin install https://github.com/kellyirvin/copilot-cli-essentials

Agents

Agents are specialized AI assistants invoked with @agent-name. Each has a defined role, curated tool access, and pre-loaded skills.

Agent	Description
@release-engineer	Orchestrates end-to-end releases — versioning, changelog, tagging, GitHub release, and post-release validation
@security-auditor	Security-focused code review and vulnerability assessment before merges and releases
@incident-commander	Incident response coordination from triage through mitigation and post-mortem
@code-reviewer	Comprehensive PR review covering correctness, security, DX, CI/CD, and CODEOWNERS
@devils-advocate	Poke holes in plans, deployments, and architecture decisions before committing
@log-reader	Efficiently triage build and deployment failures across GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Jenkins
@haiku	Lightweight executor for well-defined delegated tasks

Skills

Skills are on-demand knowledge and workflow documents. They are loaded automatically by agents when relevant.

Delivery Workflows

Skill	Description
deploy	Run the deployment workflow — pre-flight checks, environment targeting, production gate, and rollback
release	Cut a versioned release — semver bump, changelog, tag, and GitHub release
incident	Incident response workflow — triage, investigate, mitigate, communicate, and post-mortem
workflow	Debug and fix CI/CD pipeline failures
standup	Generate standup notes from git history, PRs, and issues
sync	Sync a fork or branch with upstream
onboard	Orient to a new project — structure, conventions, CI/CD, and workflows

Code Quality

Skill	Description
review	Comprehensive code review of the current branch
audit	Security and dependency audit — vulnerabilities, secrets, outdated packages
fix-issue	Fetch a GitHub issue and implement a fix
test	Run tests and analyze failures
commit	Stage changes, run preflight checks, and create a conventional commit
pr	Create a pull request with auto-generated title and description
deps	Audit, check, or upgrade project dependencies

Dev Workflows

Skill	Description
explain	Deep explanation of a file, function, or concept
execute	Find and execute an implementation plan from the plans folder
init	Initialize GitHub repo best practices — CODEOWNERS, Dependabot, branch protection, PR templates

Domain Knowledge

Skill	Description
ci-cd-pipelines	GitHub Actions patterns, caching, security, matrix builds
release-management	Semver, changelog authoring, release branching
security-scanning	OWASP Top 10, secret detection, dependency CVEs
dependency-management	CVE triage, safe upgrades, Dependabot/Renovate configuration
branching-strategy	Trunk-based development, naming conventions, PR workflow
incident-response	Severity triage, investigation playbooks, post-mortems
deployment-strategies	Blue/green, canary, feature flags, database migrations
code-ownership	CODEOWNERS setup, review standards, team routing
reading-logs	Log investigation across GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Jenkins

General Engineering

Skill	Description
architecting-systems	Clean system architecture, module boundaries, dependency management
writing-tests	Behavior-focused tests using the Testing Trophy model
refactoring-code	Structure improvements while preserving behavior
systematic-debugging	Four-phase root cause analysis before proposing fixes
handling-errors	Preventing silent failures and context loss
migrating-code	Safe migrations with backward compatibility and reversibility
optimizing-performance	Measure-first performance work
fixing-flaky-tests	Diagnosing tests that fail when run concurrently
condition-based-waiting	Replacing arbitrary timeouts with condition polling
managing-databases	Schema design, query optimization, PostgreSQL/DuckDB/PGVector
preflight-checks	Detect and run linters, formatters, and type checkers
verification-before-completion	Verification standards before claiming work is done
post-mortem	Session review to extract actionable improvements
planning-products	Feature scoping, product specs, JTBD analysis
writing-plans	Implementation plans grouped by subsystem
executing-plans	Orchestrating multi-agent plan execution

Style & Documentation

Skill	Description
writer	Writing style guide for human-sounding content
documentation	Task-oriented technical documentation
design	Precise, minimal UI design for dashboards and admin interfaces
visualizing-with-mermaid	Professional Mermaid diagrams with semantic styling
configuring-copilot	How to write skills, agents, and hooks for this plugin system

License

MIT