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by photios 145 days ago
Copilot's agent mode is a disaster. Use better tools: try Claude Code or OpenCode (my favorite).

It's a new ecosystem with its own (atrocious!) jargon that you need to learn. The good news is that it's not hard to do so. It's not as complex or revolutionary as everyone makes it look like. Everything boils down to techniques and frameworks of collecting context/prompt before handing it over to the model.
2 comments
darkwater 145 days ago
Yep, basically this. In the end it helps having the mental model that (almost) everything related to agents is just a way to send the upstream LLM a better and more specific context for the task you need to solve at that specific time. i.e Claude Code "skills" are simply a markdown file in a subdirectory with a specific name that translates to a `/SKILL_NAME` command in Claude and a prompt that is injected each time that skill is mentioned or Claude thinks it needs to use, so it doesn't forget the specific way you want to handle that specific task.
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theshrike79 144 days ago
Skills can (and IMO should) also contain scripts custom made for that skill.

Like a code review skill would have scripts that read the actual code.

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darkwater 144 days ago
Thanks for the correction, TIL.
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alkonaut 145 days ago
Sadly we have some partnership meaning it's Copilot or nothing.
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ryanhecht 141 days ago
Give Copilot CLI a try if you haven't in a while! The team's been working really hard to improve the harness, and we're taking as much community feedback as we can get! Let me know if you run into any problems :)

https://github.com/github/copilot-cli

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photios 145 days ago
I feel your pain. I used to work for a bank and the security team only approved Copilot use.

OpenCode can use Copilot natively: https://opencode.ai/docs/providers/#github-copilot

I got Claude Code running with Copilot APIs via the LiteLLM proxy, but it was a pain in the butt. Just use OpenCode.

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JeremyNT 145 days ago
If you can use the Copilot CLI, it's highly likely you can use OpenCode with the same API key. It's worth doing a little research.

The CLI tool matters. If you're not using opencode/claude you're missing out. But the latest OpenAI models are really quite good.

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ryanhecht 141 days ago
The Copilot CLI team has been making great strides towards improving our agentic harness! I'm curious, what have you found are the biggest shortcomings with it these days?
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