GitHub Copilot CLI + SQUAD + GPT-5.5 BYOK: Better Engineering, Same Hard Truth

This article details an experiment using GitHub Copilot CLI combined with SQUAD orchestration and Azure OpenAI GPT-5.5 BYOK to build a .NET WPF Windows tray app. It compares results with previous runs using CPU-only local models, GPU local models, and GPT-5-mini. The author finds that GPT-5.5 improves phase boundary adherence, safety rule compliance, and reduces stabilization loops, but does not eliminate the need for rigorous engineering. A manual UX bug was missed despite automated tests. The article also discusses cost (15M+ tokens, ~$30) and the importance of validation strategy over code generation.