Organization-level custom agents not visible in Copilot CLI when no GitHub-hosted repository is in the working directory

[cmpl-giedriusk]

Describe the bug

Organization-level custom agents defined in the agents/ directory of the org's .github-private repository do not appear in gh copilot CLI (via /agent) unless the CLI is launched from a directory that contains a git repository with a GitHub remote belonging to that organization. This works perfectly fine in VS Code.

Affected version

No response

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Define org-level custom agents in /.github-private/agents/.
2. On a machine with no local clones of any GitHub repository in that org, run copilot from any directory.
3. Run /agent — org-level agents are not listed.

Expected behavior

Org-level agents should be resolved from the authenticated user's organization membership, not from the git remote of the current working directory.

Additional context

Our organization uses Azure DevOps for source control and only has the .github-private repository on GitHub. As a result, org-level agents are inaccessible in the CLI without maintaining an otherwise unused GitHub repo clone on every developer machine.

[Wesztman]

Also stumbled upon this just this morning. It should definitely be available in /agents regardless of where I stand :)

[patrickzel]

We have that problem, too. It can't be that hard to fix it.