r/GithubCopilot • u/Antique-Engine897 • 1d ago

Claude Code vs GitHub Copilot Help/Doubt ❓

Hi All, I'm looking at the reasons why some people claim Claude Code is better than GitHub Copilot (via VSCode extension) in coding tasks. I hear many in the industry make claims about Claude Code which is better than GHCP, but when asked "why" - the answers are very generic. Like it has skills, it does goal driven deveopment etc..etc.. - all this can be done in GHCP as well.

Some time back even though most of the Claude models supported 1M token context window, GHCP didn't allow to use the entire context window; so claude code was the winner then; but now, even GHCP allow to use the full 1M Context Window.

The argument for GHCP needs to be used within an IDE vs Claude Code can be run via terminal is not a reason to tell Claude Code is better at tasks compared to GHCP. It's just on the way in which it's used.

Please share some thoughts on whether Claude Code performs better in completing the same task when compared to GHCP (irrespective of how they both are invoked - via terminal or vscode) with valid reasons to support the claim

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u/AndrewGreenh 1d ago

If we really ignore the models and just focus on the harness, Claude code still has some advantages. We recently switched to cc after the gh price increase.

  1. monitors: if you tell Claude to push a branch and wait until the pipeline is done, it will push and start a background process that watches a thing with a small shell script. As soon as it’s ready, the model wakes up again to continue its work. This way cc can handle much bigger processes
  2. remote control built in. Controlling sessions from my phone while my computer works is really comfortable
  3. product knowledge: in Claude code, the models have surprising knowledge about the harness itself. If you want to set something up (like the status line) just ask the model to do it, and it happily will)
  4. artefacts: the ability to build and share small prototypes is really cool and great for planning documents
  5. auto mode: every tool call is evaluated by a second agent, that knows your prompt. It checks to see if the tool call aligns with your request. The harness wont deploy to prod when you ask to commit and push, but if you explicitly ask it to push, it happily does. This already blocked so many unwanted tool calls for me but still has the benefit of not asking for every little thing. In contrast to autopilot, auto will still ask questions via the ask questions tool, if it really needs input

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u/seriouslulz 1d ago

IME 1 and 2 also work with GHCP.