I wish I could understand the appeal of using Claude Code inside VScode rather than Copilot. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
I wish I could understand the appeal of using Claude Code inside VScode rather than Copilot. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
I'm with you there. I can't stand the CLI that wants to take you away from the mostly bad code it writes. Give me the structure, let me finesse it - to do that I need to actually see it no matter how much Anthropic pretends that it's perfect.
I run Claude code inside an emacs vterm for moderately long lived work streams, and an ever shifting set of tmuxes for quick small features or bug fixes. The way I ensure I read the code at least a bit is the same as for wholly hand written code: I never do git add . only for one file at a time, and I got diff each file just prior to adding it (except sometimes for code genned files). I also arrange mostly to do incremental dev, sort of agile where I am the client and claude is the dev team and I check the utility of each feature one by one, so what I end up with delights me. It does tend to do more than is needed, so I will mostly delete code it has written rather than fix things. Like really not every module tunable constant needs to be over rideable from env vars. I am happy with the resulting systems, they have not collapsed into unmaintainable messes yet; the Claude in vterm in emacs is nice where I can think and run shell commands and look at code or git history while having a longer running discussion is nice UX.
I just have git diff open in another terminal. Everything I do is in the terminal.
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.
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...
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 :)
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.
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 ;)
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 wish I could understand the appeal of using Claude Code inside VScode rather than Copilot
MS thinks CoPilot is the Clark Griswold of LLMs when it's really Cousin Eddie...
Same, with regard to TUIs in general. The VS code copilot chat extension has really nice integration for 'human in the loop' style agentic development. I build some tooling - https://www.agentkanban.io to integrate a taskboard and git worktrees with copilot chat
Claude Code will write the whole thing for you. Whereas doesn’t Copilot require input along the way of coding? ie- it doesn’t do all the programming for you
It can code the whole thing for you, copilot in vscode is simply better, people just never tried it.
If you give Copilot a file with a list of tasks to complete, it will try to churn through them (just like most other harness would do these days).
Ah okay, can it work on a whole repo in an agentic way?
Yes, of course, it can also span subagents, work for an hour without interactivity if that's what you want etc. just like any other harness.
Actually due to stupid billing system of github which charges per "premium request" instead of tokens, you could and still can abuse it so it costs nothing. They're changing it from next month to usage based billing though.
I think they were comparing CLIs, not VS extensions.
I'm a little the opposite, what's the point of using an IDE with AI? I genuinely don't get it?
These days I just use Claude Code Desktop or Claude Code in powershell. Standalone, not inside and IDE. Honestly, I'm using Desktop more and more as it gets more features.
The IDE is for me. No AI in it at all. If I want to get Claude to do something specific to a file I just @ the file.
Productivity. You generate the skeleton of the code with Codex/Claude Code/et. al. and refactor it manually. It's kind of unlikely that an AI agent will be able to one-shot every bit of code in the exact way you want, even with a fat AGENTS.md file. With a smart AI-native IDE like Zed, it will quickly be able to pick up what manual change you intent to do without you fully typing out anything, especially if they're repetitive. This helps enormously when you're debugging or profiling your code.
> Productivity. You generate the skeleton of the code with Codex/Claude Code/et. al. and refactor it manually.
This doesn’t mean much if you are using a terminal editor.
the obvious answer is because it's easier , faster, and more efficient to flip a true to false right in front of you than it is to prompt an llm.
if your response is "my prompts don't produce code that needs values flipped, ever." then I would wager you're only touching very simple things with an LLM.
for me I don't care about the token cost and prompt writing so much as the fact that it's just faster to change 0 to 1 and leaves me twiddling my thumbs for an llm output less.
The thing that drove me away from manual edits was that I found myself confusing the LLM all the time. It would read or write, some code, I'd twiddle with things, and then the LLM's future references to the same code would be a mess.
On balance, and via dictation, it feels likely to be faster overall to just enact the changes I want 'inline' of the conversation thread.
Is this stuff any better now? I think current harnesses probably do have things like file change listeners that automatically inform agents before they act on a file they've previously engaged with if it has changed in the meantime.
I try to remember to tell it that the file changed, and should be reloaded. That usually avoids confusion.
If you do manual edits, I find it best to start a new conversation. But if your instructions and documentation is good enough, the new conversations won't have any problems picking up where it needs to be.
Having said that, I fear what June 1st brings for copilot It might suddenly be very useless for me.
Not really. Whenever I manually edit the code, the next turn will overwrite the changes back. You kinda have to let them know not to do that.
But you have IDE for you and cli for agent. Agent works on the same code, you can see the changes right there.
But why did you flip that true to false? It sounds like a missing unit test. So at a minimum it’s do the flip, find the right place to unit test, and write a test. Or I just tell my LLM “this should be false because of X, fix and write a test”
I just use Codex/Claude Code in one window and Neovim in another and navigate around using Niri’s keyboard shortcuts. I much prefer it to VS Code on a traditional desktop in almost every respect.
That said, I never tried copilot.
That’s like asking why anyone would use IDE autoformatting, linting, or build tools rather than constantly swapping to a terminal to run their command line versions. As in, why use tool integration in an integrated development environment? Because that’s the entire point. Classic IDE refactoring and code generation tools are limited to explicitly programmed operations, but a well-integrated LLM can do much more and smarter manipulations without you having to context switch and explain the context of what you want done.
For Windsurf at least, it makes it easier to control context. I can simply drag and drop a file from the IDE into the chat.
I can also click on a file referenced by the AI and have it open immediately in the IDE so that I can inspect it.
Finally, it is a pain to write long, multi-line prompts in a CLI where you can't easily click around to edit different parts.
The primary weakness I've found in IDE based UI is that it struggles to get through the corporate security in order to run commands.
> what's the point
Tab completion.
Smart model can cut down time to write complex firewall yaml dramatically, relying both on the existing file and the ugly draft (eg comma delimited details of the rules I need) I put out. It makes it 5 minutes lead time and 20 presses of tab instead of writing a shell/python full of edge cases or just copying existing rules as a template and laborously editing them -- smart model knows what the specific firewall needs.
But I'm not a developer, so I use both - haiku via github for tab completion and CC for cli.
For me I need to compare the code generated before committing. Also I need to read markdown plans generated for review before commit to execution. VSCode CC extension also generate clickable links to the file directly if the query has something to do with it.
All of them are valid usecase of VSCode CC extension for me.
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