Do not hang when using `-p`, a non-interactive environment, and when hitting a path permission error

[williammartin]

Description

When using -p, on a path permission error e.g.:

copilot -p "Create a directory /non-existent-root-dir"

the CLI tries to request permission:

➜ copilot -p "Create a directory /non-existent-root-dir"

I'll create the directory /non-existent-root-dir for you.


The following paths are outside the allowed directories:
  - /non-existent-root-dir

Allow access to these paths? (y/n):

This is particularly broken because the CLI doesn't properly detect whether there is a user to respond to an interactive prompt (e.g. TTY~ish):

The following paths are outside the allowed directories:
  - /dev/null || git diff --stat HEAD~1

Error: The action 'Execute GitHub Copilot CLI' has timed out after 60 minutes.

After discussion internally, we think it's altogether wrong that interactive prompting was ever added to -p mode, which is intended to be truly non-interactive. This better aligns with other tools in the same space as well.

[mark-undoio]

One of our customers is seeing a hang with our Copilot CLI integration (they have version 0.0.347 of Copilot CLI) that resembles this.

Inspecting the debugging output it looks like everything is working correctly until we see:

The following paths are outside the allowed directories:

I've omitted the paths as they're sensitive info - but I can see that they are outside the currently allowed directories. I think the path Copilot wishes to access is actually reasonable in this instance.

We do not see a y/n in the output, we just experience a hang with further output not produced from Copilot. The expected behaviour would either be for Copilot CLI to exit due to the permissions failure or to explore another approach.

[williammartin]

Yeh expect this to be fixed in an upcoming release, this is just super broken. Thanks for sharing!