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Runway Perspective

Fleet & Flight Plans — every model, one runway

🛫 The Local–Cloud Boundary

Copilot is not one thing running in one place. Every completion, chat reply, and agent action crosses a boundary between your machine and GitHub's cloud. The Runway maps that boundary: where context is gathered, where inference happens, where results land — and the five distinct data flows that connect them.

⬡ Handover Topology

Where Copilot runs and how requests flow between your machine and the cloud. Every completion, chat message, and agent action crosses at least one of these boundaries.

💻 Local Runtime

Your IDE extension host — VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, CLI. Gathers context (open files, repo index, terminal), sends requests, renders results. All prompt construction happens here.

☁️ Cloud Models

Frontier models hosted by GitHub (proxied to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI). Your prompts leave the IDE, hit GitHub's API, get routed to the provider, and the completion streams back.

🏗️ Cloud Runtime

GitHub-hosted headless agents — Cloud Agent, Copilot Workspace. No local IDE involved: the entire loop (read repo → plan → code → test → PR) runs on GitHub infrastructure.

🔑 BYOK / Customer Endpoint

Bring Your Own Key routes traffic through your Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Cloud tenant instead of GitHub's proxy. You control retention, billing, and regional pinning — at the cost of setup complexity.

Data Flows

Completions & Chat IDE → GitHub API → Cloud Model → IDE Every keystroke-triggered suggestion and chat message. ~200-800ms round trip.
Agent Mode IDE → GitHub API → Cloud Model → IDE (loop) Multi-turn local loop. The IDE orchestrates tool calls (terminal, file edits) between model responses.
Cloud Agent GitHub Issue → Cloud Runtime → Cloud Model → PR Fully headless. No local runtime. GitHub clones, plans, codes, tests, and opens a PR autonomously.
MCP Tool Calls Cloud Model → IDE → MCP Server → IDE → Cloud Model Model requests a tool call, IDE routes to the local MCP server, result feeds back into context. External data never hits GitHub's API directly.
BYOK IDE → Customer Endpoint → Customer Model → IDE Bypasses GitHub's model proxy entirely. Prompts and completions stay within the customer's cloud tenant.

⚠ NOTAMs

Notices to Air Missions — deprecations, preview status caveats, regional availability, anything that changes routing decisions.

🛠 Copilot Engine

flowchart LR
    U[You - IDE / CLI / GitHub.com] --> E[Copilot Engine]
    E --> R[Router]
    R --> P[Policy Gate]
    P --> X[Context Assembler]
    X --> M{Model Pool}
    M --> O[OpenAI]
    M --> A[Anthropic]
    M --> G[Google]
    M --> I[xAI]
    M --> F[GitHub fine-tunes]
    M --> RES[Response]
    RES --> AUD[Audit Log]
    AUD --> U

◉ Departure Board

Full model reference. Filter by plan, provider, or status — click any row for the complete briefing.

Provider
Status