The video demonstrates how to integrate and use Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex AI agents directly within Visual Studio Code, either locally or via cloud-enabled sessions, enhancing coding workflows without leaving the editor. By enabling these agents through GitHub Copilot settings and accessing them via the Copilot chat or dedicated extensions, developers can seamlessly leverage advanced AI capabilities for coding, debugging, and testing within a unified environment.
This video explores how you can integrate and use third-party AI agents, specifically Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex, directly within Visual Studio Code (VS Code) without leaving the editor. These agents enhance the coding experience by leveraging their unique capabilities through their own SDKs and model harnesses, providing a seamless and efficient workflow. The main advantages include maintaining a consistent user experience within VS Code, avoiding the need to switch between multiple applications, and enabling debugging and testing across your entire development stack in one place.
There are two main ways to use these agents: locally and remotely. Locally, you can access Anthropic Claude or OpenAI Codex alongside GitHub Copilot directly within the VS Code editor. Remotely, you need to enable cloud agents for these third-party providers, allowing you to start cloud agent sessions and use their services through the cloud. This flexibility ensures that developers can choose the setup that best fits their workflow and project requirements.
To access Claude within VS Code, you open the GitHub Copilot chat window and select Claude from the session toggle at the bottom. Claude operates through Anthropic’s SDK and is available via your Copilot subscription. You can interact with Claude using normal prompts and special slash commands like /agent for sub-agents, /hooks for lifecycle hooks, and /memory or /init for managing agent files, making it a powerful tool integrated smoothly into the editor.
For OpenAI Codex, you need to install the official Codex extension from the VS Code marketplace. Once installed, you can access Codex either through its logo or the Codex tab in the Copilot chat window. Codex offers various GPT models, permissions, and context-adding features, and you can choose to work within the Codex web or send tasks to the cloud. This setup provides a robust environment for leveraging Codex’s AI capabilities directly in VS Code.
Finally, to enable and run these third-party cloud agents, you go to your GitHub profile settings, navigate to Copilot settings, and enable the cloud agent feature under partner agents. This activation allows you to run Claude or Codex coding agents on your projects. Within your project, you can access these agents via the “agents” tab, select the desired agent, and start a session by adding your prompt. This integration streamlines the use of advanced AI coding assistants within both Visual Studio Code and GitHub, enhancing productivity and coding efficiency.