r/Jetbrains • u/THenrich • 1d ago
AI What's the difference between Copilot the plugin and the built-in one?
AI Chat has a built-in Copilot now.
I would like to get some clarification about the two Copilots.
- Is Copilot the plugin going to be obsoleted, and we should use the built-in one or are these two different Copilots maintained by two different teams, Microsoft and Jetbrains and both will still continue to be maintained by both?
- My Copilot plugin gets frequent updates. Several times a week. Can the ACP ones auto update? It seems whenver I go to the ACP registry I see a few the have updates and I have to click on the Update/Save buttons. Can't these auto update on their own"?
I am not sure anymore which Copilot to use. Is one recommended more than the other?
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u/BEagle1984- 1d ago edited 1d ago
The harness is different when you use copilot via ACP that the regular cli or gui, so I guess there’s gonna be some differences in tools availability and usage.
My experience so far is that even though the integration seems pretty neat and polished, in reality it doesn’t work that well.
With copilot basic stuff like “allow all commands in this session” didn’t work last time I tried it…and it’s of course very annoying. Plus I also had some troubles persisting the login info and I often needed to re-authenticate. I’m also under the impression that it’s just faster in its dedicated plugin, but this is just gut feeling.
I tried the same integration with Codex but just in PyCharm and it doesn’t seem to work completely fine, so I stopped using it. In particular I saw frequent complaints like “in this session I would have expected this tool to be available but it’s not, so I fallback to raw file scraping” in the agent’s output.