It's massively cheaper. Copilot charges per request, which with some clever prompting, can lead to huge amounts of work being done at fractions of the cost of Claude Code. Millions of tokens for mere pennies. MS must be taking a huge hit somewhere, because I'm probably getting 10-20x my value out of GH relative to CC.
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.
I'm spending a literal fortune on CC - we also have GH Copilot but the devs imply that CC is better? Will the Github Copilot let us access skills and agent frameworks in CC?
Devs say a lot of uninformed things. With a heavy predisposition to hating the "legacy" monoliths that are Microsoft and by association GitHub.
Yes, Copilot supports skills. Practically all agents support very similar feature sets or are actively building up parity support if not already there. The only real difference between systems is the prompt and payment method. Copilot even allows you to use Anthropic's own skills repository: https://github.com/anthropics/skills
It's a bit rich to go around calling people uninformed because they prefer one harness to another, particularly when you are recommending GHC as comparable to CC.
IME is is less capable of performing complex work, more frequently goes down blind alleys and needs correcting, that kind of thing. It's night and day vs CC.
It’s a bit rich to take the most negative interpretation of my statement, and moreso telling of your insecurities that you chose to be so offended.
And, ultimately, proving my point. Did you actually explain why you thought it’s superior? Or is it just because GitHub bad? Have you even tried it recently?
Claude (and most other models) in GitHub Copilot still only have 200k context, with a hefty amount being reserved for some reason. It's 1M at many other providers.
Do hacks like “read prompt.md, and follow its instructions. When you’re done, read it again and follow its instructions.” And then you have some background process appending to the file to keep it warm and you just keep writing there?
You could do that. I was just trying to say that if you make your original prompt complete enough, and you have well-defined success criteria, you can tell it to keep going until they are met.
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
There is a limit on how much copilot can do in one request, pretty generous but after some time vscode will say "this request is taking very long, do you want to continue" and that would count as a seperate request
I use it because they offer absurdly cheap prices that they're clearly losing money on. I can get $1000 at API prices of Opus 4.6, for in the range of $2 my cost through copilot.
Tighter (read better) integration with VSCode and Github than what you could get running claude code on the side.
Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.
Yeah, the workflow is superb. That’s what I miss most using Claude in a terminal inside VSCode. It doesn’t integrate with VSCode native diff tools like the native VSCode (GitHub Copilot does. The Claude extension in non-terminal mode is crap.
From a user point of view there's no real reason for it, from an admin point of view if your team is already using Github Enterprise then deploying it is basically hitting a toggle switch, and it has some more fine grained controls about what it can or can't do compared to Claude Code.
you can also get a service contract via MS quite easily/cheaply, which mightnot help you with hard problems but does solve the easy ones. example: in earlydays we bought OpenAI API directly and via Azure; when we needed account service we got it immediately from MS instead of waitlists from OpenAI.
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.