Comment by jimbokun

5 hours ago

I'm pretty happy with Copilot in VS Code. Type what change I want Claude to make in the Copilot panel, and then use the VS Code in context diffs to accept or reject the proposed changes. While being able to make other small changes on my own.

So I think this tracks with Karpathy's defense of IDEs still being necessary ?

Has anyone found it practical to forgo IDEs almost entirely?

12 comments

jimbokun

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simonw  3 hours ago

Are you letting it run your tests and run little snippets of code to try them out (like "python -c 'import module; print(module.something())'") or are you just using it to propose diffs for you to accept or reject?

This stuff gets a whole lot more interesting when you let it start making changes and testing them by itself.

vmbm  5 hours ago

I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.

But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.

maxdo  5 hours ago

Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even

  • jimbokun  5 hours ago

    I use it to access Claude. So what's the difference?

    • nsingh2  3 hours ago

      This stuff is a little messy and opaque, but the performance of the same model in different harnesses depends a lot on how context is managed. The last time I tried Copilot, it performed markedly worse for similar tasks compared to Claude Code. I suspect that Copilot was being very aggressive in compressing context to save on token cost, but I'm not 100% certain about this.

      Also note that with Claude models, Copilot might allocate a different number of thinking tokens compared to Claude Code.

      Things may have changed now compared to when I tried it out, these tools are in constant flux. In general I've found that harnesses created by the model providers (OpenAI/Codex CLI, Anthropic/Claude Code, Google/Gemini CLI) tend to be better than generalist harnesses (cheaper too, since you're not paying a middleman).

    • walthamstow  3 hours ago

      Different harnesses and agentic environments produce different results from the same model. Claude Code and Cursor are the best IME and Copilot is by far the worst.

  • WA  5 hours ago

    Why not? You can select Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and others.

    • spaceman_2020  5 hours ago

      Claude Code is a CLI tool which means it can do complete projects in a single command. Also has fantastic tools for scaffolding and harnessing the code. You can define everything from your coding style to specific instructions for designing frontpages, integrating payments, etc.

      It's not about the model. It's about the harness

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