3 minute read

It’s been more than the three days I had planned to wait before writing a summary – but time flies when you are having fun learning and exploring a new tool 😉

What do I still miss about GitHub Copilot?

The whole integration with GitHub is fantastic. Claude obviously isn’t built in, so it now feels like something is missing when I work directly in GitHub.

GitHub Copilot also makes all the Git tasks easier – including commit messages, pull request reviews and pull request summaries. I don’t get any of that in the same way with Claude Code.

On the flip side, GitHub Copilot doesn’t inspire me to do agentic development in the same way. For me, it’s more of a help with everyday development that makes the process faster.

In GitHub Copilot’s defense, I haven’t tried GitHub Copilot CLI yet. That is still on my todo list 😉

Where do I stand with Claude?

Claude has become my daily driver. For the way I work right now, it delivers everything I expect from an AI coding tool – and then some. It feels fast, capable and suited to agentic development.

I do acknowledge that part of this preference may come from the ecosystem around the tools. I encounter far more blog posts, reels and practical examples about Claude than about GitHub Copilot, and that constant stream of ideas makes it easier to discover new ways of working. If Microsoft invested more in practical material – blog posts, videos and real-world examples – I think GitHub Copilot would appeal to me more.

What about the next month?

I’m going to keep using Claude Code because it inspires me and makes me want to learn even more. Over the next month, I also want to explore the differences between CLI and GUI tools and understand where each approach works best 😊

So for the next month, at least, I’m not going back to GitHub Copilot as my primary tool 😉

Rant: the developers of the future

Warning: What follows is a rant with no real professional content.

That decision leaves me with a bigger question. If agentic development can change my own workflow this quickly, what will AI mean for the developers of the future?

  • Is there a future for experienced developers?
  • Is there a future for new, young developers?
  • Is the developer of the future a junior developer with an AI subscription?

I’ve reached an age where my way into the developer world consisted of sitting up at two in the morning, finding the same StackOverflow thread for the fifth time. Yes, StackOverflow 😅 – that was the place to be 😉

My introduction to NAV went: “If you press F1 in the development environment, you can read about how to code. Figure out the rest yourself.” You had to be active in various forums, both to learn something and, in time, to be able to help others yourself.

Today, we hardly dare give junior developers that kind of space. The immediate concern is often billable time: What if they spend hours learning instead of delivering? But learning is part of becoming a developer, and junior developers need room to learn, make mistakes and grow. Then comes the next concern: A junior developer with AI won’t learn properly and will only produce AI slop. Some probably will. But plenty of experienced developers already ignore best practices, so I don’t believe AI automatically makes the situation worse. On balance, I believe it can help create better codebases.

But where am I going with this rant? The next generation of developers learns to use AI from the start, and many are afraid that they therefore won’t learn to code the old way.

But honestly, the new generation of developers brings a different set of skills. They will grow up learning how to question AI output, test it and combine it with their own judgement. If we give them the right guidance, I believe AI can help them become even better developers than those of us from the previous generation.

I think we should expect more DevOps, better testing and faster development cycles. The developers of the future may spend less time losing four days to debugging – not because they understand less, but because they have better tools for finding the answer. AI won’t remove the need to learn; it will change what developers can achieve while they are learning.

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