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Comment by ethmarks | Hacker News Reader

The Copilot in Visual Studio (Code) is not the same as Microsoft's Copilot. The former is GitHub's AI product and the latter is Microsoft's AI product. You can tell them apart because GitHub Copilot's icon is a helmet with goggles and Microsoft Copilot's icon is a colourful swirl thing.

It's wildly confusing branding not only because they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs, but also because they're both ultimately owned by the same company.

I can only assume that the conflicting naming convention was either due to sheer incompetence or because they decided that confusing users was advantageous to them.

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> they're identically-named things that both repackage OpenAI's LLMs

Haven't tried it yet but the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode also seems to integrate Claude, Gemini and other non-OAI stuff

They do, and those models are served by Microsoft. You pay a premium per “request” (what that means is not fully clear to me) for certain models. If you use the native chat extension in VSCode for GitHub CoPilot, with Opus model selected, you are not paying Anthropic. This counts against your GitHub Copilot subscription.

The Claude Code extension for VSCode from Anthropic will use your Claude subscription. But honestly it’s not very good - I use it but only to “open in terminal” (this adds some small quality of life features like awareness it’s in VSC so it opens files in the editor pane next to it).

The best non-Clude Code CLI integration by far has been Zed's and I prefer Zed over what VS Code has become.

And let’s not forget that Visual Studio Code (the IDE) is not Visual Studio (the IDE).

This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer. Its especially worse when you're searching for Visual Studio (IDE) specifics, and get results for VS Code. It bewilders me why a company that owns a search engine names their products so poorly.

> This is my biggest frustration as a full time .NET developer.

Larger than the difference between the .Net Framework (that is a framework) and .Net Core (that is a framework)?

Copilot for Visual Studio (IDE) has multiple models, not just OpenAI models, it also includes Claude. It is basically a competitor to JetBrains AI.

The only good "AI" editor that supports Claude Code natively has so far been Zed. It's not PERFECT, but it has been the best experience short of just running Claude Code directly in the CLI.

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