GitHub Copilot CLI: Liku Edition (Public Preview)

The power of GitHub Copilot, now with visual-spatial awareness and advanced automation.

GitHub Copilot-Liku CLI brings AI-powered coding assistance and UI automation directly to your terminal. This "Liku Edition" extends the standard Copilot experience with an ultra-thin Electron overlay, allowing the agent to "see" and interact with your screen through a coordinated grid system and native UI automation.

See our official documentation or the Liku Architecture for more information.

🚀 Introduction and Overview

We're bringing the power of GitHub Copilot coding agent directly to your terminal, enhanced with Liku's visual awareness. Work locally and synchronously with an AI collaborator that understands your code AND your UI state.

• Unified Intelligence: Combines terminal-native development with visual-spatial awareness.
• Ultra-Thin Overlay: A transparent Electron layer for high-performance UI element detection and interaction.
• Multi-Agent Orchestration: A sophisticated Supervisor-Builder-Verifier pattern for complex, multi-step task execution.
• Liku CLI Suite: A comprehensive set of automation tools (click, find, type, keys, screenshot) available from any shell.
• Event-Driven UI Watcher: Real-time UI state tracking via Windows UI Automation events with automatic polling fallback.
• Defensive AI Architecture: Engineered for minimal footprint ($<300$MB memory) and zero-intrusion workflows.

The liku command is your entry point for visual interaction and automation. It can be used alongside the standard copilot command.

Launching the Agent

liku start
# or simply
liku

This launches the Electron-based visual agent including the chat interface and the transparent overlay.

Note: The visual overlay requires Electron (installed automatically as an optional dependency). All headless CLI commands (click, find, type, keys, screenshot, etc.) work without Electron.

Terminal Chat (Headless)

If you want an interactive terminal-first workflow (no Electron UI required), use:

This runs an AI chat loop that can emit and execute the same JSON actions as the overlay. It also supports a Teach flow that persists app-scoped preferences (execution mode + action/negative policies) under ~/.liku-cli/preferences.json.

Automation Commands

Power User Examples

# Chained automation
liku window "Notepad" && liku type "Done!" && liku keys ctrl+s

# Coordinate precision
liku click 500,300 --right

# JSON processing
liku find "*" --json | jq '.[0].name'

# Wait for UI state
liku wait "Submit" --timeout 5000 && liku click "Submit"

👁️ Visual Awareness & Grid System

Liku perceives your workspace through a dual-mode interaction layer.

• Passive Mode: Fully click-through, remaining dormant until needed.
• Dot-Grid Targeting: When the agent needs to target a specific point, it generates a coordinate grid (Coarse ~100px or Fine ~25px) using alphanumeric labels (e.g., A1, C3.21).
• Live UI Inspection: Uses native accessibility trees (Windows UI Automation) to highlight and "lock onto" buttons, menus, and text fields in real-time.
• Event-Driven Updates: The UI watcher uses a 4-state machine (POLLING → EVENT_MODE → FALLBACK) to stream live focus, structure, and property changes with automatic health monitoring.

Global Shortcuts (Overlay)

• Ctrl+Alt+Space: Toggle the Chat Interface.
• Ctrl+Alt+F: Toggle Fine Grid (Precise targeting).
• Ctrl+Alt+I: Toggle Inspect Mode (UI Element highlighting).
• Ctrl+Shift+O: Toggle Overlay Visibility.

🤖 Multi-Agent System

The Liku Edition moves beyond single-turn responses with a specialized team of agents:

• Supervisor: Task planning and decomposition.
• Builder: Code implementation and file modifications.
• Verifier: Phased validation and automated testing.
• Researcher: Workspace context gathering and info retrieval.

Chat Slash Commands

• /orchestrate <task>: Start full multi-agent workflow.
• /research <query>: Execute deep workspace/web research.
• /build <spec>: Generate implementation from a spec.
• /verify <target>: Run validation checks on a feature or UI.
• /agentic: Toggle Autonomous Mode (Allow AI actions without manual confirmation).

📦 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js v18 or higher (v22 recommended)
• npm v9 or higher

Platform-Specific

Windows UI Automation: On npm install, a postinstall script automatically builds the .NET 9 UIA host binary if the .NET SDK is detected. If skipped, you can build it manually with npm run build:uia.

Installation

Global Install (Recommended)

npm install -g copilot-liku-cli

Verify:

liku --version
liku --help

Update:

npm update -g copilot-liku-cli

From Source

git clone https://github.com/TayDa64/copilot-Liku-cli
cd copilot-Liku-cli
npm install
npm link

# Build the .NET UIA host (Windows only)
npm run build:uia

Authenticate

Set a GitHub personal access token with Copilot permissions:

1. Visit GitHub PAT Settings
2. Enable "Copilot Requests" permission.
3. Export GH_TOKEN or GITHUB_TOKEN in your environment.

Or launch the agent and use the /login slash command.

Tip: liku chat also supports /login and /model.

✅ Quick Verify

# Full smoke suite (233 assertions)
npm run smoke

# Individual checks
npm run smoke:shortcuts    # Runtime + shortcut diagnostics
npm run smoke:chat-direct  # Chat visibility (no keyboard emulation)
npm run test:ui            # UI automation baseline

🛠️ Technical Architecture

GitHub Copilot-Liku CLI is built on a "Defensive AI" architecture — minimal footprint, secure execution, and zero-intrusion workflows.

Key Systems

Performance Benchmarks

• Memory Footprint: $< 300$MB steady-state (~150MB baseline).
• CPU Usage: $&lt; 0.5%$ idle; $&lt; 2%$ in selection mode.
• Startup Latency: $&lt; 3$ seconds from launch to functional state.
• Package Size: ~196 KB (npm tarball).

Security & Isolation

• Hardened Electron Environment: Uses contextIsolation and sandbox modes to prevent prototype pollution.
• Content Security Policy (CSP): Strict headers to disable unauthorized external resources.
• Isolated Preload Bridges: Secure IPC routing where renderers only have access to necessary system APIs.
• No bundled secrets: API keys read from environment variables only; tokens stored in ~/.liku-cli/.

📚 Documentation

• Installation Guide — Detailed installation instructions for all platforms
• Quick Start Guide — Get up and running quickly

📢 Feedback and Participation

We're excited to have you join us early in the Copilot CLI journey.

This is an early-stage preview, and we're building quickly. Expect frequent updates--please keep your client up to date for the latest features and fixes!

Your insights are invaluable! Open issue in this repo, join Discussions, and run /feedback from the CLI to submit a confidential feedback survey!