Maybe dumb question: One of the use cases is instrument reading of analog instruments. My brain immediately goes to "this should have some sensor sending data, and not be analog". Is having a robot dog read analog sensors really a better fit in some cases?
So we're going to have some engineers specify suitable digital replacements given the process/environment/safety requirements. We'll procure those (noting that an industrial digital pressure transducer can easily push up towards $10k), schedule a plant shutdown (how much does that cost?), then pay a pipefitter/boilermaker to replace the old gauges with new pressure transmitters (do you need a hot work permit for that? Did you get your engineer to sign that off?). Then, your controls sparky has to find a way to route a drop back to your marshalling cabinet for connection into your fieldbus/HART/modbus/whatever network (do you have one of those?) so that your SCADA system can talk to it (do you have one of those?).
Obviously it's not really an apples-to-apples comparison, but I think the costs involved with making "simple" changes in industrial settings are easy to wildly underestimate.
I think the thing is: does it need to last 20-30 years between replacements if a robot can easily replace it + they're cheap enough to add redundant ones. Do we really need crazy accuracy even on an industrial level...like this pipe will burst at 200psi so the gauge needs to be accurate to 0.001 psi so we can sound the alarm when it hits 199.999 psi somehow I don't think so.
Dumb silicon is so super cheap now, just look to nfc etc, 1c microcontrollers. We can litter our world with sensors.
Which I would love to see - but I'm also not discounting the usefulness of any robot just being able to read something we can read and vice versa.
I can see many cases where installing an IoT camera will be more reliable and less costly than, "shut down equipment to unplug this analog instrument, hook up a digital one, calibrate it, then restart the equipment".
If it ain't broke don't fix it — pointing a cheap camera at it with some cloud compute will suffice.
Having a IoT system working flawlessly across all devices you own, would be great right?
Like your washing machine reporting its state, knowing if sun is out, running only when there is a lot of sun.
Your bsement heater sending out its stats.
And your industry machine doing the same thing.
Then you realize that we are talking about industry 4.0 for a decade now, everything IoT is either closed source or always costs extra and working together? hahahaahha...
I don't know why we can't have nice things it would be that easy :|
This is my life goal right now. I have a bajillion ideas, know how to code them (even faster now), and just not enough time due to day job. A few questions:
How do you market them?
Is customer support an issue?
Do you see risk since ai makes it so easy to build/copy?
I get that it's annoying, but also don't know what else one would do? "FooPilot is our Office AI toolset, BarWonk is our code assist tool"? There are also a lot of Claudes and GPTs. Naming things is hard.
To my understanding, Office (or "Microsoft 365") itself becoming "Copilot" was just confused messaging about the "Office Hub" app/shortcut being repurposed.
Git is a distributed source control system. It's open source and you can use it to version source code on your drive and/or a remote git repository.
Github is one of the most popular git repository hosts. In addition to source repositories, it has other services like issue tracking and wikis.
A while back, Microsoft bought Github.
"Github Copilot" is a service you can buy (with limited free sku) from Github that adds AI capabilities to your Github subscription.
One of the ways you can use Github Copilot is by using the GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode. This extension lets you use chat inside VSCode in such a way that it can read and write code. It lets you pick which LLM model you want to use: Claude Sonnet, Opus, OpenAI GPT, etc., from the ones they support.
Note you don't need another subscription if you only use Github Copilot. They pay Anthropic, you pay Github. You _might_ want another subscription directly with Anthropic if, say, you want to use Claude Code instead.
"VSCode Copilot" isn't a thing. Some people might call Github Copilot extension for VSCode "VSCode Copilot".
Github MCP server lets AI tools like GitHub Copilot extension for VSCode, Claude Code, or any tool that supports MCP use your Github account to do things like pull requests, read issues, etc. Just using it from Claude Code would not use Github Copilot tokens, UNLESS you used it to work against your Github Copilot service. You would not need a Github Copilot subscription to use it for example to create a pull request or read an issue. But it would use your Github Copilot tokens if, say, you used the MCP from Claude Code to assign a task to Github Copilot. It uses githubcopilot domain because they built it mostly for Github Copilot to use, though MCP is an open standard so it can be used from any MCP-supporting AI tool.
It's massively cheaper. Copilot charges per request, which with some clever prompting, can lead to huge amounts of work being done at fractions of the cost of Claude Code. Millions of tokens for mere pennies. MS must be taking a huge hit somewhere, because I'm probably getting 10-20x my value out of GH relative to CC.
I am not locked in to Anthropic, either. I can easily switch between GPT and Gemini models based on how I think each would perform in various scenarios. That's a big win. I use a lot of design with Opus, implement with GPT 5.4.
Also, Github Copilot CLI is pretty much at feature parity (for the stuff that matters) with Claude Code. Using both at work and home, I don't think there's much difference in features between the two. Maybe I'm not a super power user, and just a regular dumb user, but GH doesn't seem buggy and everything I think I'd want to do with CC I can do with GH.
I'm spending a literal fortune on CC - we also have GH Copilot but the devs imply that CC is better? Will the Github Copilot let us access skills and agent frameworks in CC?
Devs say a lot of uninformed things. With a heavy predisposition to hating the "legacy" monoliths that are Microsoft and by association GitHub.
Yes, Copilot supports skills. Practically all agents support very similar feature sets or are actively building up parity support if not already there. The only real difference between systems is the prompt and payment method. Copilot even allows you to use Anthropic's own skills repository: https://github.com/anthropics/skills
It's a bit rich to go around calling people uninformed because they prefer one harness to another, particularly when you are recommending GHC as comparable to CC.
IME is is less capable of performing complex work, more frequently goes down blind alleys and needs correcting, that kind of thing. It's night and day vs CC.
And this has been comparing like for like with CC - say Opus 4.6 on the same reasoning effort? Hasn’t been my experience particularly but fair enough. I do tend to use them in different situations (CC outside of work).
Even if it is close, maybe GHC CLI has improved in the last month since I last used it, I know you didn't say it but calling people uninformed because they prefer one or the other is just wrong.
I’d agree, though maybe there’s a more charitable reading of the OP - “uninformed” is one of those accusations that it’s rarely very polite or fair to level against an individual but sometimes is reasonable against a group based on observation. My experience would be that it’s true that “devs says lots of uninformed things” - and I’d include myself in that. It’s been my experience that it’s particularly tough in this space at this time because:
1. Tooling is changing very fast but people tend to form sticky opinions (reasonably enough - there’s only so much time in the world).
2. It’s just hard to form robust objective opinions - you have to make a real effort to build test cases and evaluation processes and generally the barrier to entry there is pretty high.
So - I agree, calling people uninformed is not a great way to win them over, but maybe that’s the price of living in a world of anecdotes which become fixed in people’s minds.
Make it write a skill and rule hook for PreCompact to do a handoff that explains what was worked on, what to know, and what to do next. If it goes off the rails after compaction then it won’t be great in a new session either, and you want to make sure you maximize continuity or development will be unsustainable. A backlog.md and improvements.md workflow also helps with this (ticket numbers, descriptions, “focus on BACK-0075,” etc.)
It’s a bit rich to take the most negative interpretation of my statement, and moreso telling of your insecurities that you chose to be so offended.
And, ultimately, proving my point. Did you actually explain why you thought it’s superior? Or is it just because GitHub bad? Have you even tried it recently?
Claude (and most other models) in GitHub Copilot still only have 200k context, with a hefty amount being reserved for some reason. It's 1M at many other providers.
Do hacks like “read prompt.md, and follow its instructions. When you’re done, read it again and follow its instructions.” And then you have some background process appending to the file to keep it warm and you just keep writing there?
You could do that. I was just trying to say that if you make your original prompt complete enough, and you have well-defined success criteria, you can tell it to keep going until they are met.
> "Fix the following compile errors" -> one shot try and stops.
> "Fix the following compile errors. When done, test your work and continue iterating until build passes without error" -> same cost but it gets the job done.
There is a limit on how much copilot can do in one request, pretty generous but after some time vscode will say "this request is taking very long, do you want to continue" and that would count as a seperate request
I use it because they offer absurdly cheap prices that they're clearly losing money on. I can get $1000 at API prices of Opus 4.6, for in the range of $2 my cost through copilot.
Tighter (read better) integration with VSCode and Github than what you could get running claude code on the side.
Your question does raise a valid point - Github Copilot's value proposition is fairly limited in my opinion. Not to say worthless but limited and clearly varies depending on how Githubbey your dev workflows are.
Yeah, the workflow is superb. That’s what I miss most using Claude in a terminal inside VSCode. It doesn’t integrate with VSCode native diff tools like the native VSCode (GitHub Copilot does. The Claude extension in non-terminal mode is crap.
From a user point of view there's no real reason for it, from an admin point of view if your team is already using Github Enterprise then deploying it is basically hitting a toggle switch, and it has some more fine grained controls about what it can or can't do compared to Claude Code.
you can also get a service contract via MS quite easily/cheaply, which mightnot help you with hard problems but does solve the easy ones. example: in earlydays we bought OpenAI API directly and via Azure; when we needed account service we got it immediately from MS instead of waitlists from OpenAI.
I’ve often thought this would be a good business for college age kids or teens. My parents and other I know are hesitant to send off to a 3rd party online. I think if someone local came and either did mobile or took and brought back they would trust that over even mailin services.
Similar. I regularly use Github copilot (with claude models sometimes) and it works amazingly. But I see some who struggle with them. I have sort of learned to talk to it, understand what it is generating, and routinely use to generate fixes, whole features, etc. much much faster than I could before.
I’ve found copilot to generate worse code, and the editor integrations to be unusable (lets insert this block of code at the wrong place in the file for example), but overall for it to do the right thing enough that I can patch it. I’ve found Claude code just goes mad and gets stuck in a loop and I need to pull it out and figure out where in the hundreds of lines of code it’s generates in the last few minutes it’s gone so wrong.
I am a developer turned (reluctantly) into management. I still keep my hands in code and work w team on a handful of projects. We use GitHub copilot on a daily basis and it has become a great tool that has improved our speed and quality. I have 20+ years experience and see it as just another tool in the toolbox. Maybe I’m naive but I don’t feel threatened by it.
At least at my company the problem is the business hasn’t caught up. We can code faster but our stakeholders can’t decide what they want us to build faster. Or test faster or grasp new modalities llms make possible.
That’s where I want to go next: not just speeding up and increasing code quality but improving business analytics and reducing the amount of meetings I have to be in to get business problems understood and solved.
Similar story. I’m a bit younger, but Amiga BASIC/VB3/VB6/ASP/.NET was my path. There was a joy when “Visual Studio” meant “you can visually drag a component on and that is the app” instead of editing text files. But gradually we learned you need to be in the code. Sure you have figmas and low code tools today. But industry has gravitated back to editing curly brackets and markup in text files. And for good reasons I think.
I landed on GitHub Copilot. I now manage a team, but just last night snuck away to code some features. I find my experience and knowing how to review the output helps me adopt and know how much to prompt the agent for. Is software development changing? Absolutely. But it always has been. These tools help me get back to that first freedom I felt when I dragged a control onto a VB6 designer, but keep the benefits of code in text files. I can focus on feature, pay attention to UX detail, and pivot without taking hours.
I was just thinking about this today. Apples lack of any 3rd party integration for things like this and iMessage is really annoying sometimes. In addition to a secondary backup, I’d love to automatically sync some photos from a certain album to my parents photo frame. Or if I take a nice nature shot have it sync to a Samsung frame tv. I get the benefits of the walled garden but esp w photos and messaging it seems like opening up a little would allow for some innovation
I have used this in a “beta” feature for an enterprise app and really like it. In ~100 lines of code I have a secured OpenAI compatible endpoint that I can chat with, and write tools for in .NET. I have it doing natural language query over some data and it works quite well.
You can also expose the agents as MCP, AGUI and so it can be a tool you integrate with other AI platforms.
