Day Two with Claude Code
The following blog post was written with the help of AI.
This is day two of my Claude Code experiment, and the more I dig into it, the more I keep discovering about GitHub Copilot too.
Looking at Copilot differently
The funny thing is that exploring Claude Code has made me realize how many of the same things I might have been able to do with GitHub Copilot — if I had approached it differently.
I probably didn’t ask myself the right question: how much can I actually get out of GitHub Copilot?
So the deeper I go into Claude, the more aware I become of what I could have done with Copilot. That gives me another reason to keep digging into Claude Code, but it also makes me want to turn the full setup on for Copilot and see what I’ve been missing there.
Now that Claude Code is up and running, the learning has started.
Skills, but with a limit
One of the first questions was whether I should install a whole collection of skills, or simply start using Claude Code as it is.
I’ve looked through a couple of skill libraries, and there are a lot of skills available. It would be very easy to install everything that looks interesting and then never really learn how to use any of it.
So I’ve put a limit on myself: a maximum of five skills, and I have to use those before I fetch any more.
That feels like a better way to explore them. Skills should be deliberate tools, not just a collection of things I’ve installed, forgotten about, and don’t really know how to use.
Access to my machine
One of the biggest reasons I was attracted to Claude was the possibility of having it work directly on my PC — with my files, tools, and the rest of the environment I use every day. My own limitation has been realizing that GitHub Copilot can also navigate my PC, provided I use the right harness around it. That is an important distinction: perhaps the capability was not missing after all — I simply had not given Copilot the right setup to use it. The more you learn, I guess 😊
Now I have enabled all access to my PC so I can see how far I can push it. It is a lot of access, and I want to understand what that actually means in practice rather than just guessing.
The cost of leaving the Microsoft ecosystem
There is a downside, though. I am running Claude Pro, and I have already hit limits that would require a Team plan for some of the things I wanted to try, such as bringing it into Outlook and similar services. Leaving the Microsoft suite of tools means that some of the integrations I am used to require a bit more setup. I will look into that at a later point.
These are the kinds of limitations I did not run into with Copilot. Since Copilot fits into the Microsoft and GitHub ecosystem I was already using, those integrations felt much more natural and did not require the same level of extra setup.
The things I miss from Copilot
The Claude Code application and the features I get from GitHub Copilot in VS Code are two different things.
Today I wanted to go back to writing some code the old-school way to solve a complete problem. That was when I ran straight into something I had started taking for granted: code completion.
GitHub Copilot’s autocomplete had become a major tool for me in that kind of project. Claude Code doesn’t provide those same VS Code features, because it is built as an agent rather than as an autocomplete tool. That was a bit of a downer. It turns out I was really happy with that part of GitHub Copilot.
I also miss several of the GitHub features I used, such as automatically describing pull requests and similar tasks. Those conveniences are gone when I move that part of my workflow over to Claude, and that is a bit of a bummer.
Maybe the problem is what I don’t know
So I hit a realization about what I am doing. I do not know what I am doing — I jumped straight into testing without research, which was a bit dumb. I researched some of the key differences between GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, and I ran into the GitHub Copilot app. (I suppose I should have used that one before jumping into Claude Code, but I did not know about it.) https://github.com/features/ai/github-app
Like a blind man, I ran to install the GitHub Copilot app to get my old GitHub Copilot features back in VS Code, and I whooped, best of both worlds! But no, that is not what my experiment is leading up to — I pull myself together and close the GitHub Copilot app.
The learning here is that it confirms I made the switch to Claude on a wrong assumption — I was not getting all that Copilot could do.
That is probably the most useful realization from day two. I am still exploring Claude Code, but I also need to explore GitHub Copilot properly — this time with the full setup and a better understanding of what it can actually do.
I will stay with my challenge and keep getting the Claude experience to its full extent.
PS: did I mention that I used Claude to fix a real GitHub issue from start to finish, and a request for a change on an open pull request? 😉
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