zlacker

I love Copilot in VSCode. I have it set to use Claude most of the time, but it let's you pick your fav LLM, for it to use. I just open the files I'm going to refactor, type into the chat window what I want done, click 'accept' on every code change it recommends in it's answer, causing VSCode to auto-merge the changes into my code. Couldn't possibly be simpler. Then I scrutinize and test. If anything went wrong I just use GitLens to rollback the change, but that's very rare.

Especially now that Copilot supports MCP I can plug in my own custom "Tools" (i.e. Function calling done by the AI Agent), and I have everything I need. Never even bothered trying Cursor or Windsurf, which i'm sure are great too, but _mainly_ since they're just forks of VSCode, as the IDE.

>>quanta+(OP)
Have you tried the agent mode instead of the ask mode? With just a bit more prompting, it does a pretty good job of finding the files it needs to use on its own. Then again, I've only used it in smaller projects so larger ones might need more manual guidance.

>>SkyBel+Y9
I assumed I was using 'Agent mode' but now that you mentioned it, I checked and you're right I've been in 'Ask mode' instead. oops. So thanks for the tip!

I'm looking forward to seeing how Agent Mode is better. Copilot has been such a great experience so far I haven't tried to keep up with every little new feature they add, and I've fallen behind.

>>quanta+(OP)
Try doing https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/05/13/2230, you’ll have some fun,

>>quanta+VD
I find agent mode much more powerful as it can search your code base for further reference and even has access to other systems (I haven't seen exactly what is the other level of access, I'm guessing it isn't full access to the web but it can access certain only info repositories). I do find it sometime a little over eager to do instead of explain, so Ask mode is still useful when you want explanations. It also appears that agent has the search capabilities while ask does not, but it might also be something recently added to both and I just don't recall it from being in ask mode as I'm use to the past when it wasn't present.

>>rcarmo+h71
I've come to the same conclusions mentioned in most of that and done most of that already. I was an early-adopter of LLM tech, and have my own coding agent system, written in python. Soon I'm about to port those tools over to MCP so that I can just use VSCode for most everything, and never even need my Gradio Chatbot that I wrote to learn how to write tools, and use tools.

My favorite tool that I've written is one that simply lets me specify named blocks by name, in a prompt, and AI figures out how to use the tool to read each block. A named block is defined like:

# block_begin MyBlock ...lines of code # block_end

So I can just embed those blocks around the code rather change pasting into prompts.

>>SkyBel+ai2
Yeah in Ask mode, it shows me the code it's proposing, and explains it, and I have to click an icon to get it to merge the change into my code tentatively and then click "Keep" to make it actually merge into the code permanently. I kind of like that workflow a lot, but I guess you're saying Agent Mode just slams the changes into the code. I may or may not like that. Often I pick only, parts of what it's done. Thanks for the tips.