Essay

VS Code's new Agents window looks like a productized version of my Claude-Code-as-orchestrator setup — until the fine print: it runs entirely on GitHub Copilot, models and billing included, with your Anthropic subscription invisible to the flow. Why I'm staying on the Claude Code extension, moving orchestration to Anthropic's desktop app, and what 'orchestration' actually decomposes into.

If you are using LLMs to write code, using LLMs to review the MRs is wrong. The writing-time model already had the best context for spotting errors; an MR-time bot is a weaker pass with less information. And the part of review that genuinely needed a second mind — team priors, incident history, intent — is exactly what a second LLM session cannot supply. Close the loop upstream at prompt time and downstream at behavior, not on the diff.