conductor doctor: offline view misleadingly shows copilot as unconfigured (all credential env vars ✗)

[jrob5756]

Summary

The default (offline) conductor doctor output makes the copilot provider look unconfigured/not-ready, even when it is fully authenticated and working. It renders all of copilot's credential environment variables as red ✗, with no indication that those env vars are optional. New users reasonably read this as "copilot is broken."

In reality, copilot authenticates via the GitHub/Copilot CLI login on disk, so those env vars are best-effort hints — not requirements. This is even stated in a code comment, but never surfaced in the output.

Reproduction

With no GITHUB_TOKEN / GH_TOKEN / COPILOT_PROVIDER_* env vars set (but a valid Copilot CLI login on disk):

$ conductor doctor
...
                                   Providers
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Provider         ┃ Insta… ┃ Tier  ┃ Credentials                     ┃ Notes  ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━┩
│ copilot          │   ✓    │ stab… │ ✗ GITHUB_TOKEN                  │ —      │
│                  │        │       │ ✗ GH_TOKEN                      │        │
│                  │        │       │ ✗ COPILOT_PROVIDER_API_KEY      │        │
│                  │        │       │ ✗ COPILOT_PROVIDER_BEARER_TOKEN │        │

Every credential row is ✗ and the Notes column is empty — nothing tells the user this is expected/fine.

Actual vs. expected

Actual: All copilot credential env vars show ✗, implying the provider is not ready.

Expected: The offline view should make clear copilot can authenticate via the GitHub/Copilot CLI login and that the env vars are optional overrides — so an all-✗ credentials cell for copilot does not signal a problem.

The provider is in fact ready — the connection probe confirms it:

$ conductor doctor providers --check --provider copilot
│ copilot  │ ✓ │ stable │ ✗ GITHUB_TOKEN ... │ ✓ connected │ — │

Root cause

• src/conductor/providers/diagnostics.py — _CREDENTIAL_ENV_VARS already documents the nuance in a comment, but it never reaches the rendered report:

  Copilot authenticates via the GitHub/Copilot CLI login on disk, so its GitHub-token vars are best-effort hints rather than hard requirements.

• src/conductor/cli/doctor.py — _credentials_cell() renders any absent var as a ✗ (dimmed), identical to a provider that genuinely requires the credential (e.g. claude/ANTHROPIC_API_KEY). There is no per-provider distinction between "required" and "optional hint" credentials, and no note is attached to copilot explaining the CLI-login path.

Proposed fix (options — open to discussion)

1. Attach an informational note to the copilot diagnostic in the offline path, e.g. authenticates via GitHub/Copilot CLI login; env vars optional, surfaced in the Notes column.
2. Model credentials as optional vs. required so the renderer can present optional-only providers differently (e.g. label the cell "optional" / neutral styling instead of hard-red ✗ when all creds are merely hints).
3. Hint toward --check when a provider's readiness can't be determined offline (copilot), so users know the offline view isn't the whole story.

At minimum (1) removes the "looks broken" signal with a small change; (2) is the more principled fix.

Environment

• Conductor v0.1.22
• Copilot provider, no credential env vars set, valid Copilot CLI login on disk

[jrob5756]

Starting to take a look at this.