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Comment by oefrha | Hacker News Reader

I try GitHub Copilot every once in a while, and just last month it still managed to produce diffs with unbalanced curly braces, or tried to insert (what should be) a top-level function into the middle of another function and screw up everything. This wasn’t on a free model like GPT 4.1 or 5-mini, IIRC it was 5.2 Codex. What the actual fuck? Only explanation I can come up with is that their pay-per-request model made GHC really stingy with using tokens for context, even when you explicitly ask it to read certain files it ends up grepping and adding a couple lines.

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You're not using the good models and then blaming the tool? Just use claude models.

Copilot's main problem seems to be people don't know how to use it. They need to delete all their plugins except the vscode, CLI ones, and disable all models except anthropic ones.

The Claude Code reputation diff is greatly exaggerated beyond that.

What, 5.2 Codex isn’t a good model? Claude 4.5 and Gemini 3 Pro with Copilot aren’t any better, I don’t have enough of a sample of Opus 4.5 usage with Copilot to say with confidence how it fares since they charge 3x for Opus 4.5 compared to everything else.

If Copilot is stupid uniquely with 5.2 Codex then they should disable that instead of blaming the user (I know they aren’t, you are). But that’s not the case, it’s noticeably worse with everything. Compared to both Cursor and Claude Code.

5.2 Codex is up there with claude lmao

Agree, but it seems dependent on field. One day I wanted a browser extension made, and 5.2-codex-max added hundreds of lines of code several times, and for 15-20 iterations I did not change one thing, or even have an opinion on what it was doing. This is extremely uncommon for other models for me, even Opus I would say. And yes, I mostly do small green-field things and not even that works all the time, even if LLMs are clearly at their best there.

I had my first go at using it (Github Copilot) last week, for a simple refactoring task. I'd have to say I reasonably specified it, yet it still managed to to fail to delete a closing brace when it removed the opening block as specified.

That was using the Claude Sonnet 4.5 model, I wonder if using the Opus 4.5 model would have managed to avoid that.

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