GitHub MCP tool for interactive Copilot chat session (without PR creation)?

[ganeshb24]

Is there a GitHub MCP tool (or API) that can open an interactive chat session with Copilot for codebase exploration — e.g., investigating features or debugging — without creating a PR?

Currently, the only programmatic option I'm aware of is assign_copilot_to_issue_with_intent, which assigns the coding agent to an issue. However, that workflow is:

• Asynchronous (no back-and-forth conversation)

• PR-centric (always creates a branch + PR)

What I'm looking for is a way to programmatically start a synchronous, conversational session with Copilot that has full codebase context — similar to Copilot Chat on github.com — but invokable via MCP/API.

Questions:

1. Does such a tool/API exist today?

2. If not, is this on the roadmap?

3. Are there alternative approaches to achieve interactive, read-only code Q&A programmatically?

Thanks!

[Miko997]

I think the Copilot SDK is probably the closest thing to what you're looking for.

It isn't an MCP call that opens the Copilot Chat UI on github.com, but it does let you run a persistent conversational session against a local checkout:

import { CopilotClient } from "@github/copilot-sdk";

const client = new CopilotClient({
  workingDirectory: "/path/to/repo",
});

await client.start();

const session = await client.createSession({
  model: "gpt-5",
});

const first = await session.sendAndWait({
  prompt: "Explain how authentication is wired in this repository.",
});

console.log(first?.data.content);

const followup = await session.sendAndWait({
  prompt: "Which tests cover that path?",
});

console.log(followup?.data.content);

Reusing the same session keeps the conversation context, and it doesn't inherently create an issue, branch or PR.

The main difference is that the codebase context comes from the checkout in workingDirectory, rather than GitHub loading an arbitrary remote repository. For strictly read-only use, I'd run it against a read-only checkout and reject write/shell permission requests.

There is already a small interactive example in nodejs/samples/chat.ts.