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Comment by 23b | Hacker News Reader

Is there an advantage to this setup over using VSCode Copilot in Agent mode with Claude Sonnet 3.7 or 4? What am I missing out on?

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You have to try and experience claude code to answer this question. Otherwise it's just going to be a pointless debate here. If you live in a linux terminal you're going to be instantly addicted. Make sure you read the docs. Use a CLAUDE.md, create planning docs for big tasks in markup format, iterate on the planning doc until you're happy then get it to implement. And also use the technique of, as you approach the context limit have it write its memory to a file, /clear and then read that file back in. This gives you better mileage.

Is the technique with writing memory to file mentioned somewhere ? interested to read

How can you keep track of the current context limit if you are on Claude Pro or Max? I'm used to their desktop app for MCP use and there is no way to tell until the end-of-the-road popup shows up.

I couldn't get Copilot agent mode to work with Playwright MCP. It was installed, it appeared in the tools selection config, but copilot insists it doesn't have access to any of its functions.

What happens if you type:

#browser_navigate https://news.ycombinator.com/

I had to do some installing and setup to get playwright to work. Now, how to get the agent to use the working playwright on its own is a different matter.

I was able to have it work with Playwright but many times it doesn't figure out that it needs to use the playwright MCP tool and instead tries to use curl or something else

Which model? I had Claude Sonnet agent running Playwright just yesterday.

Why would model affect the ability to use tools? I just tried sonnet 4, 3.7 and gpt 4.1 without luck. Playwright opens fine from other tools where i configured it.

Someone more knowledgeable on how these LLMs are trained and fine-tuned can weigh in, but it absolutely does matter. Some models are much more "willing" to use tools (and more adept at discerning when to use them) than others.

I can't comment on why you're having this issue specifically, unfortunately.

yeah, this was not about eagerness to use a tool. It specifically listed available tools and functions and insisted it can not access this playwright related ones.

As I readily admit in my parent comment, I'm not an expert on the tool-calling mechanics. But from other threads, my understanding is it can be a manifestation of the same issue. I know that's not really helpful to you, just wanted to call out that switching models can alter this behavior.

Hopefully you got it worked out by now?

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