For decades, the “Command Line” has been a gated community. If you knew the secret handshakes (commands), you had infinite power. If you didn’t, it was just a scary black box.

The Revolution: From Commands to Conversation

This bridges the gap between what you want done and how to do it. You provide the intent; it handles the execution.

Getting Started in 3 Steps

You don’t need to be a computer wizard to set this up. If you have a GitHub Copilot subscription, you’re already halfway there.

1. Install it

Open your terminal (Command Prompt on Windows, Terminal on Mac) and run one command.

On Mac (using Homebrew):

brew install copilot-cli

On Windows:

winget install GitHub.Copilot

Using NPM (Any OS):

npm install -g @github/copilot

2. Wake it up

Once installed, just type:

copilot

This launches Interactive Mode, which is basically a conversation.

3. Log in and Chat

It will ask you to log in on your first run. Follow the link to authorize with your GitHub account, and that’s it. You are now dropped into a chat interface.

You don’t need to memorize commands. You can just ask:

• “How do I check my internet speed?”
• “List all the files I modified yesterday.”
• “Explain what this error message means.”

Or, as I did, you can give it a real challenge.

The “Messy Desktop” Experiment

I decided to put it to the test with a real-world disaster: my own Desktop.

I am a digital hoarder. My desktop was a warzone of:

• Screenshots of error messages
• PDF invoices from freelancers
• Random images of design ideas
• Personal receipts

I wanted to clean it up, but I didn’t want to just sort by file type. I wanted to organize by context. I wanted all my financial stuff together, whether it was a PDF text file or a PNG image of a receipt.

The Ask

I opened the terminal and gave it a prompt that would usually require a custom Python script and several API keys:

This is actually a very complex request. I was asking the AI to:

1. Look at every file on my desktop.
2. Read the text inside the images (using OCR).
3. Read the text inside the PDFs.
4. Understand what the document actually is (distinguishing “du” the telecom company from “du” the disk usage command).
5. Create new folders and sort them logically.

The “Oh No” Moment: Broken Paths

The cleanup worked perfectly. My desktop was spotless. But then, I tried to open my VS Code workspace, and it was empty.

Why? The workspace file (candede_astro.code-workspace) is just a text file that tells VS Code where your projects are using relative paths.

When it lived on my Desktop, it looked for my projects here: "path": "../repo/my-project"

But when Copilot moved it into the new Development & Code/ folder, it was now one level deeper. It was looking for a repo folder inside the Development & Code folder, which didn’t exist.

Self-Correction

Instead of manually editing the JSON file, I just asked Copilot to fix its own mess:

Instead of just doing a blind find-and-replace, Copilot actually investigated the filesystem. It checked if the repositories existed relative to the Desktop, then verified the user home directory, found where the projects were actually stored, and calculated the correct relative paths itself. This is the true power of an agent: it doesn’t just “do a task”—it investigates, reasons, and solves the problem based on the real state of your system.

It found Attachment Removal Design.png. It saw UI elements and wireframes inside the image. “This belongs in Design & UI Work.”

It found coffee_bean_2025.pdf. “This looks like an invoice.”

The Result

After thinking for a moment, it proposed a brand new folder structure for me:

Proposed Organization:

 1. Bills & Invoices
  - du_oct_2025.png (Telecom bill)
  - coffee_bean_2025_012.pdf (Invoice)

 2. Business Proposals
  - Contoso - Copilot Project.pdf

 3. Design & UI Work
  - Attachment Removal Design.png
  - clean_website_look.png
  - Screenshots of UI work

 4. Client Projects
  - SEHA/ folder (Logos, JSON configs)
  - Bureau Veritas/ (Logo files)

Why This Matters for the “Average Joe”

You might not care about terminal commands or scripting, and that’s fine. But this represents a huge shift in how we use computers.

For decades, we’ve had to organize our files the way the computer wants us to: by type, size, or date. Now, we are entering an era where we can organize things the way we think.

You can simply tell your computer: “Here is my mess, please fix it based on what these files actually are.”