News

Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'

• By David Ramel
• 11/20/2024

The brand-new Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 lets developers specify the AI model they want to use with the baked-in GitHub Copilot, but some devs are clamoring for more options, such as the latest/greatest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic that is available in VS Code.

GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022 was originally provided as an extension.

Then it became a built-in, recommended component by default in all workloads with v17.10.

Then came the ability to "pick your model" in the latest update.

Then came complaints the only options available were from OpenAI, a Microsoft partner bolstered by investments north of $10 billion.

Microsoft has not invested in Anthropic, though that leading AI company has struck deals with Google and Amazon, partnering on several different initiatives.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet enhances AI capabilities with advanced coding skills, improved natural language understanding, and a "computer use" feature that enables the AI to interact with digital environments like a human (see "Anthropic Unveils Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Haiku, Expands AI with 'Computer Use' Public Beta").

Microsoft-owned GitHub on Oct. 29 announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available to all GitHub Copilot customers, saying it outperforms all publicly available models on a benchmark.

That is, unless those customers are using Visual Studio 2022. Such support may be coming -- after all, that Copilot support for Anthropic's model was announced just a couple weeks before VS 2022 v17.12 debuted. Still, many users want it now.

A Developer Community post titled "GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio 2022 still lacks Claude 3.5 Sonnet model option" said:

After upgrading to Visual Studio 2022 version 17.12, while Copilot now allows switching between language models, only gpt-4o, o1, and o1-mini are available as options.

I have confirmed that the 'Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet in Copilot' option is enabled in GitHub Copilot settings, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet works properly in VS Code.

However, the new version of VS 2022 still doesn't show this option. I'm not sure if this should be considered a missing feature or a bug.

Indeed, opening up Visual Studio Code shows these options:

Opening up Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 shows these models:

The Developer Community post has been upvoted eight times and generated comments still rolling in today that include:

• I'm also waiting for an official response. Earlier, there was an update to version 17.12.1, but it still didn't mention this aspect.
• It doesn't make sense that VS Code can have such a service, but VS 2022 can't.
• In the variety of models in this update, the first thing I looked for was the Claude Model, but it was not available. Sad!
• Is there a timeline to when this will be available? I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere in the docs this is a VS code only feature. Took hours trying to get VisualStudio to show the Claude option. I thought it was my installation.

The GitHub community wasn't happy, either, according to some comments on a post about Claude 3.5 Sonnet being available to all Copilot customers in public preview, published some three weeks ago. One user couldn't find it in Visual Studio 2022 but was notified it's only in VS Code. Resulting comments included:

• Any timeframe? Why is Visual Studio 2022 behind on Visual Studio Code.. Why is VSC always prefered?
• When will claude be available in VS2020? So disappointed in your guys.The gap between you and cursor is soooooooooo big
• This [unavailability in VS IDE] should be publicized more, as it took me several days to find this out. Do you have a time frame for when this will be updated in other IDE's?

While no one could provide a time frame, one user did say: "Right now the model picker is only in Visual Studio Code but Visual Studio is on the roadmap!"

Neither this editor nor several AI constructs could find any such plans or roadmap, but we'll keep looking. Who knows, maybe someday Microsoft will weigh in on the matter and say if it's "a feature or a bug." Stay tuned.