There’s really no functional difference. The VSC agent mode can do everything you want an agent to do, and you can use Claude if you like. If you want to use the CLI instead, you can use Claude Code (or the GitHub one, or Codex, or Aider, or…)

I suspect that a lot of the “try using Claude code” feedback is just another version of “you’re holding it wrong” by people who have never tried VSC (parent is not in this group however). If you’re bought into a particular model system, of course, it might make more sense to use their own tool.

Edit: I will say that if you’re the YOLO type who wants your bots to be working a bunch of different forks in parallel, VSC isn’t so great for that.

Claude Code is not a VSCode fork, it's a terminal CLI. It's a rather different interaction paradigm compared to your classical IDE (that said, you can absolutely run Claude Code inside a terminal inside VSCode).

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.

Agents, skills etc. Stuff that's specific to the Claude CLI tooling and not the model.

Sonnet 4.5 as a raw model is good, but what makes it great is the tool that calls it.

Think of it like this: Sonnet 4.5 is the engine, but the whole car around it matters a LOT.

Copilot is kinda crap as a LLM tool, the tool calling permissions are clunky, it doesn't support sub agents or skills or anything fancy really. The best thing about it is that it can see the "problems" tab on VSCode provided by different addons and linters and you can tell an agent "fix the active problems" and it'll get to work.

Copilot as a harness for the model is generic enough to work with every model. Claude sonnet, haiku, and opus are trained with and specifically for Claude code in mind.

Also, as a heavy user of both, there are small paper cuts that seriously add up with copilot. Things that are missing like sub agents. The options and requests for feedback that cc can give (interactive picker style instead of prompt based). Most annoyingly commands running in a new integrated vscode terminal instance and immediately mistakenly "finishing" even though execution has just begun.

It's just a better harness than copilot. You should give it a shot for a while and see how you like it! I'm not saying its the best for everybody. At the end of the day these issues turn into something like the old vi/emacs wars.

Not sponsored, just a heavy user of both. Claude code is not allowed at work, so we use copilot. I purchased cc for my side projects and pay for the $125/m plan for now.

I find copilot simply worse at "understanding" codebases than claude code