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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty happy with Copilot in VS Code. Type what change I want Claude to make in the Copilot panel, and then use the VS Code in context diffs to accept or reject the proposed changes. While being able to make other small changes on my own.

So I think this tracks with Karpathy's defense of IDEs still being necessary ?

Has anyone found it practical to forgo IDEs almost entirely?

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I've found copilot chat is able to do everything I need. I tried the Claude plugin for vscode and it was a noticeably worse experience for me.

Mind you copilot has only supported agent mode relatively recently.

I really like the way copilot does changes in such a way you can accept or reject and even revert to point in time in the chat history without using git. Something about this just fits right with how my brain works. Using Claude plugin just felt like I had one hand tied behind my back.

I find Claude Code in VS Code is sometimes horribly inefficient. I tell it to replace some print-statements with proper logging in the one file I have open and it first starts burning tokens to understand the codebase for the 13th time today, despite not needing to and having it laid out in the CLAUDE.md already.

I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.

But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.

Are you letting it run your tests and run little snippets of code to try them out (like "python -c 'import module; print(module.something())'") or are you just using it to propose diffs for you to accept or reject?

This stuff gets a whole lot more interesting when you let it start making changes and testing them by itself.

Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even

Why not? You can select Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and others.

Claude Code is a CLI tool which means it can do complete projects in a single command. Also has fantastic tools for scaffolding and harnessing the code. You can define everything from your coding style to specific instructions for designing frontpages, integrating payments, etc.

It's not about the model. It's about the harness

This would make some sense if VS Code didn't have a terminal built into it. The LLMs have the same bash capabilities in either form.

Claude Code is a CLI tool which means it can do complete projects in a single command

https://github.com/features/copilot/cli/

Huh? There is nothing stopping copilot from doing an entire project in one go.

Ive done it 10s of times.

"Copilot has done 10 tool calls, do you want to continue" or whatever was the bane of my existence before our company approved Claude for use.

Like I asked you to do this task, then you spent time looking around and now want me to pat you on the back so you can continue?

it's not a model limit anymore, it's tools , skills, background agents, etc. It's an entire agentic environment.

Github copilot has support for this stuff as well. Agent skills, background/subagents, etc.

Implementation differences do matter. I haven't found Copilot to have as many issues as people say it does, but they are there. Their Gemini implementation is unusable, for example, and it's not because of the underlying models. They work fine in other harnesses.

The model is the engine, the framework is the rest of the car.

With Copilot Microsoft has basically put the meanest leanest triple-turbo'd V8 engine in a rickety 80's soviet car.

You can kinda drive it fast in a straight line if you're careful, but you can also crash and burn really hard.

I use it to access Claude. So what's the difference?

This stuff is a little messy and opaque, but the performance of the same model in different harnesses depends a lot on how context is managed. The last time I tried Copilot, it performed markedly worse for similar tasks compared to Claude Code. I suspect that Copilot was being very aggressive in compressing context to save on token cost, but I'm not 100% certain about this.

Also note that with Claude models, Copilot might allocate a different number of thinking tokens compared to Claude Code.

Things may have changed now compared to when I tried it out, these tools are in constant flux. In general I've found that harnesses created by the model providers (OpenAI/Codex CLI, Anthropic/Claude Code, Google/Gemini CLI) tend to be better than generalist harnesses (cheaper too, since you're not paying a middleman).

Different harnesses and agentic environments produce different results from the same model. Claude Code and Cursor are the best IME and Copilot is by far the worst.

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