I have been having great fun (and I believe a fair bit of success) with Copilot.
However recently I have had some misgivings as chronicled in
this thread,
I found that Copilot was (very begrudgingly) only giving me the absolute minimum that satisfied my prompts.
I guess this is sort of obvious but it was a serious wake up call to me.
So I got to thinking: how could I get a full quality result from it.
Light bulb moment
- if I got Claude to critique the code produced by Copilot then fed that critique into Copilot...
Well it worked like a charm - however it took something like 30 iterations until they both signed off.
Occasionally I would reverse the order:
- Ask Claude to critique
- Then ask Claude to fix what it thought was wrong
- Ask Copilot to critique the code produced by Claude
- ...
This took 2 days because I kept running out of daily whatevers in Claude (free version Sonnet 4.6)
The end result was java code that was originally 144 lines became 413 lines (a lot of it error checking and handling) - see the
end result here.
Single biggest takeaway - if "vibe coding" is a single iteration through tools like these then it is going to be
code.