CopilotOnToast: Making GitHub Copilot CLI a Little More Noticeable

Sometimes the best little tools come from a minor irritation.

Over the last weekend I found myself temporarily using Claude Code after my GitHub account mistakenly lost access to Copilot. That has now been resolved, thankfully, but the short detour was useful. It reminded me that while I am very much a fan of GitHub Copilot as an AI coding harness, there was one small feature from Claude Code that I missed when I came back.

The missing nudge

I use GitHub Copilot CLI more and more as part of a broader agentic workflow. In particular, I have been using multi-agent orchestration patterns like Brady Gaster’s Squad framework, where agents can hand work off to each other, run in parallel, and collaborate across different parts of a codebase.

That is extremely powerful. But it also changes how I work.

I no longer sit and stare at the terminal waiting for every response. I might be reviewing another codebase, reading documentation, answering emails, or writing a blog post while Copilot gets on with something. The problem is that sometimes Copilot is not getting on with something. Sometimes it is waiting for me.

It might need approval to run a tool. It might have completed a turn. It might have hit an error. Or, in a multi-agent workflow, one of the agents may have finished doing its bit and handed over to another.

And unless I happen to switch back to that terminal, I may not notice. So I wrote a small PowerShell script called CopilotOnToast.

It uses GitHub Copilot CLI hooks to trigger a local script on key lifecycle events, and then uses the BurntToast PowerShell module to send Windows desktop notifications. The result is simple: Copilot can now tap me on the shoulder when something needs attention.

It is not a big framework, and it is not trying to change how Copilot works. It is just a small quality-of-life improvement for people who already have agent sessions running in the background and want a bit more visibility.

The first version supports notifications for things like:

• session start and end
• agent turn completion
• tool approval requests
• errors
• failed tool usage
• prompt submission
• customisation via a /toast skill

The most useful one for me is the “action needed” notification. That is the moment where Copilot is waiting for approval, and where I am most likely to lose time because I have wandered off into something else.

It is also surprisingly helpful when running multiple agents. When they start talking to each other, handing work around, or completing their own turns, the notifications make the whole thing feel a little more alive. Less like a silent terminal session, and more like a set of assistants that can politely nudge you when they need you.

I am open-sourcing the scripts under the name CopilotOnToast. The repo includes the hook configuration, the PowerShell notification script, and the /toast skill so it can be dropped into other Copilot CLI workflows with minimal fuss.

Because sometimes the future of software engineering is autonomous agents reasoning across your codebase.

And sometimes it is just a toast notification saying:

Copilot is waiting for you.

Thank you to Ben Kolde and Yang Plasticine on Unsplash for the images used in this post (I added the Logo to the Egg… sorry)