AI Coding Tips Thread

Sirrel Squirrel · 8 Feb 2026 at 21:56

mid_gen said:
Opus is the best coding model by a country mile, but it comes into it’s own when used with Claude Code.

I’ve tried a lot of the agentic IDEs, they’re all just VS Code in a frock. I tend to just use a plain terminal in VSCode now…for play programming like Python, JS etc. For real programming (C++) a plain terminal alongside Visual Studio 2026 works well.

I built out my MCP server for Unreal a bit more. It’s pretty useful, will tidy it up and make the repo public in the week.

When you say use it in Claude Code, is that just in Terminal?

mid_gen · 9 Feb 2026 at 09:17

Sirrel Squirrel said:
When you say use it in Claude Code, is that just in Terminal?

Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding agent system, it’s terminal based, although there is a VS code plugin that puts a slightly nicer looking frock on it.

Sirrel Squirrel · 9 Feb 2026 at 10:48

mid_gen said:
Claude Code is Anthropic’s coding agent system, it’s terminal based, although there is a VS code plugin that puts a slightly nicer looking frock on it.

This is probably a stupid question but if I'm using Antigravity IDE (VSCode in a frock

) and use Opus as the agent model is that basically just the same as using Claude Code?

edit/ just answered my own question - I hit a rate limit with Opus in Antigravity and have to wait 4 days for it to reset, I only did about 20 prompts :cry:

IC3 · 21 Feb 2026 at 20:22

Sirrel Squirrel said:
This is probably a stupid question but if I'm using Antigravity IDE (VSCode in a frock ) and use Opus as the agent model is that basically just the same as using Claude Code?

edit/ just answered my own question - I hit a rate limit with Opus in Antigravity and have to wait 4 days for it to reset, I only did about 20 prompts

I just hit the limit on the Pro plan, have to wait till 26th Feb. :cry:

I was consistently hitting the 200k limits, so no wonder, it held up pretty well tbh, all the additional perks you get its actually good value for money.

Nate--IRL-- · 22 Feb 2026 at 20:09

Got a 365 co-pilot licence at work last week - haven't coded anything in my life, never touched python / C etc. - in 3 days of messing about I've build a little windows app in python, with fancy graphs the monitors the systems vital statistics. Added all the little tweaks I wanted other app to have for myself.

The AI suggested the structure, each component is modular, I can tweak the Disk stats panel without breaking other things for example.

I'm honestly astonished at how easy it was, and how good the end result was. The only difficulty now is coming up with useful ideas.

One thing I would really really like is eliminating the copy and paste back and forth with vscode. It gets tedious, especially when the indenting is wrong on paste.

Nate

Mesai · 22 Feb 2026 at 20:32

Nate--IRL-- said:
Got a 365 co-pilot licence at work last week - haven't coded anything in my life, never touched python / C etc. - in 3 days of messing about I've build a little windows app in python, with fancy graphs the monitors the systems vital statistics. Added all the little tweaks I wanted other app to have for myself.

The AI suggested the structure, each component is modular, I can tweak the Disk stats panel without breaking other things for example.

I'm honestly astonished at how easy it was, and how good the end result was. The only difficulty now is coming up with useful ideas.

One thing I would really really like is eliminating the copy and paste back and forth with vscode. It gets tedious, especially when the indenting is wrong on paste.

Nate

Are you copying code between vscode and some other chat window?

You can install the Python and copilot extension is Vscode. The former will handle formatting and a couple other things, the later will let copilot work within the IDE.

Nate--IRL-- · 22 Feb 2026 at 21:07

I found the python extension, it did most of the hand holding re formatting etc. but it didn't occur to me there was a co-pilot one too. Will check it out.

Nate

Noxia · 23 Feb 2026 at 01:01

You can also use a formatter like Prettier and set VSC to format on save.

mid_gen · 23 Feb 2026 at 10:42

Nate--IRL-- said:
Got a 365 co-pilot licence at work last week - haven't coded anything in my life, never touched python / C etc. - in 3 days of messing about I've build a little windows app in python, with fancy graphs the monitors the systems vital statistics. Added all the little tweaks I wanted other app to have for myself.

The AI suggested the structure, each component is modular, I can tweak the Disk stats panel without breaking other things for example.

I'm honestly astonished at how easy it was, and how good the end result was. The only difficulty now is coming up with useful ideas.

One thing I would really really like is eliminating the copy and paste back and forth with vscode. It gets tedious, especially when the indenting is wrong on paste.

Nate

you really shouldn’t be copy pasting. Use a coding agent Codex, Claude Code, Copilot….

Mesai · 23 Feb 2026 at 10:43

mid_gen said:
you really shouldn’t be copy pasting. Use a coding agent Codex, Claude Code, Copilot….

He's using VSCode - he just needs the extension.

mid_gen · 23 Feb 2026 at 10:52

Mesai said:
He's using VSCode - he just needs the extension.

Yes, but there's a fundamental difference that I think a lot of people don't grasp fully.

At the most basic level, you have ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, whatever.....it's a very basic chat completion interface. You type some text, it returns text. You can ask it to make code and then copy paste it into your code files.....but that's a *really* crappy way to work and incredibly slow for programming work.

Then you have coding agents. Claude Code is the best (still). This is MORE than a chat interface. It is a chat interface with a suite of tools it can use, to read your filesystem, search for files, read files, edit files, run commands etc. The ChatGPT version is called Codex. These agents not only do work, but they can spawn subagents to delegate tasks to.

You can use coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in two ways :

1) Just through a terminal, literally just open a command line, type 'claude', and off you go.

2) Through an IDE plugin, Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains have the best plugins. This basically gives you the same experience as the command line, with a prettier interface, and a bit more context for the agent (like what file you have open).

Chat interfaces and coding agents are very different things.

Don't use chat interfaces (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) to write code. Using coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Github Copilot). They are different products for different tasks.

(I'm not trying to be patronising it's just a misunderstanding that a lot of people have, not helped by the new tools coming out every few months

)

Mesai · 23 Feb 2026 at 11:06

mid_gen said:
Yes, but there's a fundamental difference that I think a lot of people don't grasp fully.

At the most basic level, you have ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral, whatever.....it's a very basic chat completion interface. You type some text, it returns text. You can ask it to make code and then copy paste it into your code files.....but that's a *really* crappy way to work and incredibly slow for programming work.

Then you have coding agents. Claude Code is the best (still). This is MORE than a chat interface. It is a chat interface with a suite of tools it can use, to read your filesystem, search for files, read files, edit files, run commands etc. The ChatGPT version is called Codex. These agents not only do work, but they can spawn subagents to delegate tasks to.

You can use coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in two ways :

1) Just through a terminal, literally just open a command line, type 'claude', and off you go.

2) Through an IDE plugin, Visual Studio Code and Jetbrains have the best plugins. This basically gives you the same experience as the command line, with a prettier interface, and a bit more context for the agent (like what file you have open).

Chat interfaces and coding agents are very different things.

Don't use chat interfaces (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) to write code. Using coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Github Copilot). They are different products for different tasks.

(I'm not trying to be patronising it's just a misunderstanding that a lot of people have, not helped by the new tools coming out every few months )

I think you're missing the fact that the Copilot extension in VSCode has an agent mode. He needs to make sure he's on that and not on "Ask", which is the difference you're describing.

He has a Copilot license (I assume that's what the 365 offer is), so his options are the Github CLI agent (I don't know if this is out of preview yet), or the Copilot extension in VSCode, which has an agent mode, not just a chat mode, so he can use his license to log in to the extension, put it in agent mode and toggle between whatever models he has access to.

mid_gen · 23 Feb 2026 at 11:12

Mesai said:
I think you're missing the fact that the Copilot extension in VSCode has an agent mode.

He has a Copilot license (I assume that's what the 365 offer is), so his options are the Github CLI agent (I don't know if this is out of preview yet), or the Copilot extension in VSCode, which has an agent mode, not just a chat mode, so he can use his license to log in to the extension, put it in agent mode and toggle between whatever models he has access to.

See this is demonstrating exactly what the problem is

There is not a Copilot extension in VS Code. There is a Github Copilot extension.

Copilot = Chat interface
Github Copilot = Coding Agent

ChatGPT = Chat Interface
Codex = Coding Agent

Claude = Chat Interface
Claude Code = Coding Agent

They've all made an absolute hash of the naming and communication of these products.

Mesai · 23 Feb 2026 at 11:25

mid_gen said:
See this is demonstrating exactly what the problem is

There is not a Copilot extension in VS Code. There is a Github Copilot extension.

Copilot = Chat interface
Github Copilot = Coding Agent

ChatGPT = Chat Interface
Codex = Coding Agent

Claude = Chat Interface
Claude Code = Coding Agent

They've all made an absolute hash of the naming and communication of these products.

That's wrong because it's an all-in-one. The extension is called "GitHub Copilot Chat" and it's the only official thing that resembles Copilot when you search for the word "copilot" in the extensions.

I'm not arguing about the distinction between an agent and a chat interface; I'm very familiar with the landscape, but the extension I've told him to download is the right one. Hell, even the chat function is fine because it'll switch to agent mode if needed.

sityeuropa · 23 Feb 2026 at 11:32

mid_gen · 23 Feb 2026 at 11:33

Mesai said:
That's wrong because it's an all-in-one. The extension is called "GitHub Copilot Chat" and it's the only official thing that resembles Copilot when you search for the word "copilot" in the extensions.

I'm not arguing about the distinction between an agent and a chat interface; I'm very familiar with the landscape, but the extension I've told him to download is the right one. Hell, even the chat function is fine because it'll switch to agent mode if needed.

I'm not really talking to you with this btw, more a general FYI for people that are dipping their toes into AI assisted coding, and probably aren't up to speed with the differences in the products!

I think anyone that has been impressed with what they can do when they're copy and pasting stuff from chatGPT, is going to have their mind blown when they get set loose on Claude Code...

Mesai · 23 Feb 2026 at 11:42

mid_gen said:
I'm not really talking to you with this btw, more a general FYI for people that are dipping their toes into AI assisted coding, and probably aren't up to speed with the differences in the products!

I think anyone that has been impressed with what they can do when they're copy and pasting stuff from chatGPT, is going to have their mind blown when they get set loose on Claude Code...

I know, it changes weekly, and you're absolutely right to call out the difference between chat and agent because they work completely differently, which also affects token usage (if you're on a small plan).

I just wanted to give the guy the simplest path forward considering he's new to coding. If copy and paste was working ok before, this should be a massive quality of life improvement

Nate--IRL-- · 23 Feb 2026 at 16:01

Yep - I need another licence for Github copilot if i want VSCode integration it seems. The 365 premium licence won't work for the GitHub Extension.

No matter - this was only a play thing for me.

The Copy and Paste of diffs is actually educational in a way, I'm picking up how things are structured etc.

Nate

Trifid · 25 Feb 2026 at 07:00

Cromulent said:
Been playing around with this and I'm shocked at how good it is. My only real concern is that it would be easy to integrate security issues when large amounts of code gets generated at a single time.

A good example of this:

iamgigglz · 25 Feb 2026 at 08:56

The little dev house I work at has been tinkering with AI for a while now but yes, we're all copy-pasting back & forth using chat agents - mostly Claude but we'll skip around when we run out of free credits :cry:

We're old boys so it's taken a minute for us to cotton on to what coding with AI really means. Boss man is now looking at organising a proper licence for us - likely Claude Code.

Can Claude Code be set up to "see" only the solution you're currently working on? ie could we have a distinct agent PER solution?
We specifically don't want to give it access to our devops repo and don't want it pulling from customer A's code to solve a problem for customer B.