I'm curious about the opposite: Why would anyone use the CLI when, at least with Copilot, the VSCode plugin is super tightly integrated with VSCode, meaning the agent can see everything I can see. There's no mismatch in linter calls where I can see a lint in the ide that the agent can't find for example. I've had this problem even using CC in their VSCode extension, so I can't imagine it's not an issue in the CLI as well.
What's actually better in the CLI?
We need sandboxing for any agent, so we run it within Docker - so we use CLI.
I use vscode with containers extensively. Not sure why containers imply CLI.
do you run vscode in the container ? if so, can you share your config ?
i've been trying to do this with systemd-nspawn
Easiest way to do it would be enable ssh in container and then use VSCode ssh extension. Your host VSCode “becomes” your container VSCode.
I run it natively on my rocky8 container with UI sometimes but usually just do ssh
I use the Claude Code VSCode plugin for 80% of my work.
I prefer it because I can look at the code (although not as often anymore) and config (very often!) easily.
It also lets me jump to previous conversations easily.
There are a few cases where the CLI makes sense. One big one is if you are running multiple simultaneous sessions on a remote server using Tmux to have them preconfigured when you reconnect is nice.
Bun in general I don't see the benefit either.
You can look at the code in editor or IDE even when CLI agent is doing work.
I do that when I want to, but for me using agents in IDE is like looking with one eye covered.