Fallback · one click

Run Copilot CLI in your browser

For the days when your laptop says no. One click to a prepared environment.

When your work laptop will not let you install Node, npm, or the Copilot CLI, this gets you the full experience in a browser tab. No IT involvement. No installer dialogues. Free on a personal GitHub account.

One click

Open the repo as a Codespace

Open in a Codespace →

What happens after the click:

  1. GitHub asks you to sign in. Use a personal account, not your work account. Work accounts often inherit policies that block exactly what we are about to do.
  2. You see a Create codespace page for JW-Sthlm/ai-operator-intro. Click Create new codespace. The defaults are fine.
  3. About 90 seconds to boot. The devcontainer installs Node 20, the GitHub CLI, and Copilot CLI for you while you wait.
  4. You land in a browser VS Code with the terminal at the bottom, and a welcome page that confirms everything is ready and tells you the next three steps. The terminal is where you work.
✅ Your Codespace is isolated. It runs on GitHub's infrastructure, in a private container only you can see. Edits live only in your Codespace. Nothing pushes anywhere. It stops on idle, and you can delete it when you are done.
First run

Sign in and say hello

In the terminal, start Copilot CLI:

copilot --allow-all

Copilot shows a device code and asks you to visit github.com/login/device. Open the link, paste the code, approve. Use the same personal account from the click above.

Back at the > prompt, try a real operator prompt:

Help me draft a one-paragraph intro email to a new Microsoft partner contact, casual tone.
✅ That is it. You're running an AI operator from a browser tab. --allow-all lets it run commands, read and write files, and fetch URLs without asking each time. Safe here, because the Codespace is a sandbox.
If something looks off after the boot

One fix covers most of it

If the terminal welcome banner says Welcome to Codespaces! You are on our default image instead of You are on a custom image defined in your devcontainer.json file, the devcontainer did not load. Fix it one of two ways:

Then verify:

copilot --version

You should see a version number. If the command is not found, the devcontainer did not finish loading. Rebuild and check again.

⚠️ Codespace won't create? Check you are signed in with a personal GitHub account. No personal account yet? Create one in 2 minutes at github.com/signup, then turn on Copilot Free at github.com/settings/copilot.
Continue

Pick up the course

Jump to the course for the four short lessons, or build something straight away with Exercise 1: Customer briefing. The repo is already in your Codespace.

When you're done

Stop or delete the Codespace

The Codespace stops automatically after 30 minutes of inactivity. To clean up explicitly, visit github.com/codespaces, find your codespace, click ..., then Delete. That frees the storage quota too.

Cost: free on a personal account, 60 hours a month on the smallest machine. This uses well under 2 hours.

← Back to setup Landing →
Community and partner enablement material. Not an official Microsoft or GitHub product. Adapted from GitHub's Copilot CLI for Beginners (MIT).