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Comment by maxdo | Hacker News Reader

Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even

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.

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.

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