Comment by sefrost
19 hours ago
I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code. Turns out there’s a GitHub Copilot CLI!
I thought I was pretty familiar with available options, but no one in my circles ever mentions this product. It doesn’t seem to have much mindshare.
Has anyone used it? What’s your experience?
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.
2 replies →
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.
The vs code integration is pretty slick. I can copy and paste function names into the prompt and it automatically turns them into these `#sym:` reference objects that I presume populate the context window with metadata about the function and where it lives. It knows what file I'm currently looking at as I jump around in the code, and that automatically gets loaded into the context. I can also drag and drop folders or specific files for context into the sidebar.
It's a lot of stuff that makes me have to type less into the prompt, since it's already getting so much info from my editor
I’m actually trying to move back from the Claude Code style, I feel like it’s easy to become distant from your own code, and I am feeling uncomfortable with that.
I’ve “vibe-coded” some projects and when I start to find issues or go to refactor them I don’t have that memory of why decisions were made, because many decisions were never made.
I've used it quite a bit. There are a lot of AI terminal coding products and this is another one. It works well, handles sub-agents without issue and does a reasonable job operating in the Copilot ecosystem. It handles mid-task questions and such we well.
I’ve tried OpenCode, Claude Code and Codex CLI. But was just shocked that Microsoft has a version I hadn’t even heard of.
Personally I got CLI fatigue and am happy with Conductor for now, but things are moving fast in this space.
The naming is bad. VS Code Copilot Chat.
But its a really good UI for agentic coding. Not sure why more people don't use it. I've tried the others and keep coming back to Copilot chat. It's a really good tool. Which is why the rugpull on pricing is so concerning.
Yeah, I've been using it heavily at work since the beginning of January (and have a personal Anthropic sub to compare to). Copilot CLI is pretty good, honestly. Most new features in Claude Code get cloned by Copilot CLI within a couple weeks. Claude models seem mildly more clumsy in that harness than the one they're trained on - subjective guess around 20% more turns for an equivalent task - but it's not a noticeable difference in the final output.
> I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code.
I use Claude Code, but I kept my Copilot subscription around mostly for really cheap usage of other models when I need to try a different one (which appears to be ending, in a sense) and also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files, I could make changes in one file and then just tab through some others.
I wonder what other good autocomplete is out there.
> also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files <...> I wonder what other good autocomplete is out there.
I am in the same boat. I tried looking for tab/auto-complete implementations ~ a year ago and it was pretty disappointing. If that has changed, would love to know!
Windsurf has free unlimited tab complete, I use it as an IDE alongside Claude Code and it works pretty well. I think Google's Antigravity also has free tab complete but no idea if its any good.
Cursor (paid) and antigravity (free) come to mind.
The other cool thing is Copilot SDK, so you can build agentic capabilities into apps, or build tools, that leverage the agent harness of the Copilot CLI:
https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/
That's espoused as the big reason for the price increase: most Copilot subscribed developers it seems have moved to "agentic usage" with the CLI and Cloud-based agents.
Which feels a bit like a kick in the pants for me as a developer that was primarily using Copilot for VS Code ghost text and very rarely used the Chat sidebar much less "agentic" tools.
Copilot Pro sort of made sense for my personal account when amortized across a year, but I don't want to "waste" $10/month on credits I won't use most months.
It's in their ToS to allow using Copilot subscription with OpenCode - https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...
Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now
Liability. I work in a tightly regulated market and I cannot use any service due to be in touch with PII data. If it was my option I would just use OpenCode with deepseek, it is more than enough for the majority of my tasks.
I've used it. It's on par with OpenCode imho.
I'm just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7
I don't know about others, but I use Copilot more often than other apps because of its tight integration with the VS Code itself where I still spend most of my time working on other things while letting AI do some task that I decided to delegate to it.
claude/gemini/crush inside of agent-of-empires inside of ghostty in one window, and zed in the other for touch-ups.
I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.
Quite honestly I love the GitHub Copilot CLI. I pair it with Squad and it’s awesome.
https://bradygaster.github.io/squad/
If I have the same repo also open in VSCode, it’s also aware of that fact, so you can give it context (a file or selected lines of code).
I've been using it for a few months because Copilot was the only AI blessed by our corporate overlords. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code, which I've used extensively on personal projects. However CC was recently approved, and I'm betting that with these changes to Copilot pricing we'll end up dropping it like a hot potato.
Because Copilot is the only thing allowed at our corp
it's my favourite harness so far
Search has become so bad that I also struggled to find Claude Code alternative and made my own tight (not editors, not plugins, not agents, strictly similar to Claude Code CLI) list: https://github.com/omarabid/cli-llm-coding
The list is not long but there are quite a few options. Even Grok has its own CLI!
The reality is, even though a CLI prompt looks very simple, it's a very complex piece of software. I personally use Claude Code (with GLM) and anything else I have tried was significantly inferior (with the exception of opencode).