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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

Slightly related (me not understanding) is why the Copilot in VS code is essentially just CLI interface. Why can't it use the IDE tools (search, LSP, ...). All it ever does is trying to execute grep.

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Someone mentioned here the other day that when you try and give Claude those tools throughan MCP or skill it tends to go a bit loopy.

At the moment it seems like the way it's been trained has been tightly coupled with grep.

It does feel bizarre though that it doesn't use the symbol servers.

Because it’s far far easier to make a text-generation machine generate text that has decades of how-to explanations on the Internet than to correctly work an internal editor API that changes often and isn’t as well-documented.

Especially if you want effective results.

Claude Copilot does seem a bit more lost on the interface side than other models, but then again all of them are. Only the baseline tier seems to have been fine tuned to the platform.

I replaced common grep with a semantic search wrapper for some projects. It was amusing. It has a response header that lets Claude know it is not using standard grep. Works fine. Have to out smart them ;)

I'm not sure how you can believe that GitHub Copilot in VS Code is just a CLI interface when the former existed long before the CLI. It's not. For a certain amount of time, the two teams weren't even working together. The CLI was adding things customers were wondering when would it reach VS Code. So, it's not just a CLI harness. They added the ability to call the CLI from VS Code but GitHub Copilot in VS Code existed before the CLI and is remains a separate thing that's just interfacing with the CLI now.

All I can say is I know because I know. There's been some "synergizing" among the corporation about the CLI team running off to do their own thing and adding features to the CLI that amount to trying to force a Terminal to act like a GUI.

Claude’s prompt heavily pushes it towards grep. We have an internal cross repo semantic search mcp and to get Claude to consistently use it a skill and prompting was not enough. A pre tool use hook is the answer. Claude will even write one for you if you describe the problem to it :)

There is an option to turn on semantic indexing and search on copilot in vscode. Although I have no perceptual differences when I turn it on. The docs mention something about it.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/copilot/reference/workspa...

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