A GitHub employee built a terminal roguelike dungeon crawler — entirely with GitHub Copilot CLI — that turns any repository into a playable game. The extension, called gh-dungeons, generates deterministic dungeons unique to each repo and commit SHA.
What the project actually does:
- Procedural generation from code — dungeon layouts are seeded by the repository’s structure and current SHA, so every repo produces a different map, and every commit changes it
- Written in Go — ships as a standard GitHub CLI extension, installable with
gh extension install - Built with Copilot CLI as the primary coding tool — the developer (Lee Reilly, a longtime Hubber) leaned on Copilot’s terminal-level suggestions throughout the build
- Deterministic output — same repo + same SHA = same dungeon, every time
The interesting angle isn’t the game itself — it’s the workflow. Copilot CLI is positioned as command-line autocomplete, but this project pushes it closer to a coding agent that can scaffold entire features from a terminal session. Writing a procedural generation system in Go, with tile rendering and game-loop logic, is a non-trivial test of how far CLI-based AI assistance can carry a solo developer through unfamiliar territory.
NOTE
gh-dungeons is a GitHub CLI extension, not a standalone binary. You need the gh CLI installed, then run gh extension install leereilly/gh-dungeons to play.
The project also fits a broader pattern at GitHub: using internal side projects to stress-test Copilot’s capabilities in contexts beyond typical web-app CRUD. A roguelike with procedural generation, terminal rendering, and deterministic seeding covers algorithmic ground that autocompletion alone wouldn’t handle well.
gh-dungeons is open source and available now. Each dungeon is tied to your repo’s SHA — push a commit, get a new map.