Comment by threecheese

VSCode Copilot relies on a lot of IDE-isms for prompt management, which I find cumbersome. The cli agents generally just ingest markdown files in various directory structures which is just less friction for me. Also they are more similar to one another, ish, whereas vscode mostly stands alone (except it supports agents.md now).

It also lacks a lot of the “features” of CC or Codex cli, like hooks, subagents, skills, or whichever flavor of the month you are getting value out of (I am finding skills really useful).

It also has models limited to 128k context - even sonnet - which under claude has (iirc) a million tokens. It can become a bottleneck if you aren’t careful.

We are stuck with vscode at $job, and so are making it work, but I really fly on personal projects at home using the “Swiss army knife “.

There are of course good reasons for some to prefer an ide as well, it has strengths. Like much more permissible limits and predictable cost.