alt Hacker NewsI don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?
This confusion even bleeds into other coding harnesses. I have no idea which GitHub MCP server I setup in Claude Code, but the domain has “githubcopilot” in it. Am I burning copilot tokens (or “requests” or whatever is their billing unit) when I use this from Claude?
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> I don’t use windows, so most of this doesn’t affect me, but I do use GitHub and VSCode. Can anyone clarify, once and for all, whether “GitHub Copilot” and “VSCode Copilot” (sic?) are the same product? The documentation isn’t even clear, and it’s important because it affects billing. How do these two products interact and where do they NOT overlap?
There is no VSCode Copilot. There is Github Copilot integration inside VS Code.
Niece comment tries to explain a little: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47643220
Tldr yes they're the same agentic harness in different UIs. Web browser, android app, ide extension, cli tool. They all change the "how" but not the "what". You buy premium you get more prompts and models.
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.