I'm pretty happy with Copilot in VS Code. Type what change I want Claude to make in the Copilot panel, and then use the VS Code in context diffs to accept or reject the proposed changes. While being able to make other small changes on my own.

So I think this tracks with Karpathy's defense of IDEs still being necessary ?

Has anyone found it practical to forgo IDEs almost entirely?

I've found copilot chat is able to do everything I need. I tried the Claude plugin for vscode and it was a noticeably worse experience for me.

Mind you copilot has only supported agent mode relatively recently.

I really like the way copilot does changes in such a way you can accept or reject and even revert to point in time in the chat history without using git. Something about this just fits right with how my brain works. Using Claude plugin just felt like I had one hand tied behind my back.

I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.

But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.

Are you letting it run your tests and run little snippets of code to try them out (like "python -c 'import module; print(module.something())'") or are you just using it to propose diffs for you to accept or reject?

This stuff gets a whole lot more interesting when you let it start making changes and testing them by itself.

Coplilot is not on par with cc or cursor even