How to use GitHub Copilot free / student plan ?

[FabriceSalvaire]

For a Copilot free plan the model is Auto model selection only.
While Emacs ECA proposes a list of models which are only available for a pro plan.

[ericdallo]

@FabriceSalvaire, I took a look at that and did a small improvement to not list models not in your plan.

Since June 24 GitHub made Auto the only model selection on Copilot Free/Student (https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-24-changes-to-model-selection-for-free-and-student-plans/).

ECA lists whatever Copilot's /models endpoint returns, and it returns the whole catalog regardless of plan, with a model_picker_enabled flag per model that ECA was ignoring. Fixed in master: entries flagged false are now hidden, like VS Code does. Hidden models can still be added under providers.github-copilot.models.

Auto itself can't be offered by ECA. It's not a model you can send to /chat/completions (the auto-model-3 catalog entry returns model_not_supported). VS Code drives it through POST /models/session, which answers 404 for non first-party clients, same as opencode found in anomalyco/opencode#20235. So unless GitHub opens that API, Copilot Free is likely not usable from ECA or any other harness via that.

To confirm what your plan allows, could you paste:

The output of this (prints only your sku and model flags, no tokens):

GH_TOKEN=$(grep -o 'ghu_[A-Za-z0-9]*' ~/.cache/eca/db.transit.json | head -1)
TOKEN_JSON=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/copilot_internal/v2/token \
  -H "authorization: token $GH_TOKEN" \
  -H "editor-version: vscode/1.107.0" -H "editor-plugin-version: copilot-chat/0.35.0")
echo "$TOKEN_JSON" | jq '{sku, api: .endpoints.api}'
API=$(echo "$TOKEN_JSON" | jq -r '.endpoints.api // "https://api.githubcopilot.com"')
curl -s "$API/models" \
  -H "authorization: Bearer $(echo "$TOKEN_JSON" | jq -r .token)" \
  -H "editor-version: vscode/1.107.0" -H "editor-plugin-version: copilot-chat/0.35.0" \
  -H "copilot-integration-id: vscode-chat" \
  | jq -c '.data[] | {id, picker: .model_picker_enabled, policy: .policy.state}'

Anything with picker: true and policy: "enabled" is what you can use in ECA.

[ericdallo]

I decided to do like opencode and improved the default:

• now we hide models that user don't have access, like opencode, user can always add the model via config if they want
• no more gpt-5.5 as default, we use from the list of availables for your account