It burns tokens if you BYOK but you can hook into GH Copilot LLMs directly
I really like the orchestrator and architect personas as is out of the box. I prefer it over Cursor / Windsurf for a few reasons
- no indexing (double edged sword)
- orchestrator I find much more useful than windsurf cascades
- tool usage is fantastic
The no indexing is a double edged sword, it does need to read files constantly, contributing to token burn. However, you don't have to worry about indexed data being on a 3rd party server (cursor), and also since it has to crawl to understand the codebase for it to implement, to me it seems like it is more capable of trickier code implementations, as long as you utilize context properly.
For more complex tasks, I usually either spend 20-30 minutes writing a prompt to give it what I'm looking to implement, or write up a document detailing the approach I'd like to take and iterate with the architect agent.
Afterwards, hand it off to the orchestrator and it manages and creates subtasks, which is to provide targeted implementation steps / tasks with a fresh context window.
If you have a GH Copilot license already, give it a shot. I personally think it's a good balance between control as an architect and not having to tie my time down for implementations, since really a lot of the work in coding is figuring out the implementation plan anyways, and the coding can be busy work, to me personally anyways. I prefer it over the others as I feel Windsurf/Cursor encourages YOLO too much.
Honestly I've been getting a lot of use out of LLMs for coding, and have been adjusting my approach to LLM usage over the past year and a half. The current approach I take that has been fairly effective is to spend a lot of focus energy writing out exactly what I'm looking to implement, sometimes taking 30 or more minutes creating a specs doc / implementation plan, and passing it to a agent with an architect persona to review, generate a comprehensive, phased implementation document. I then review the document, iterate with it to make sure the plan works well, then send it off to do the work.
I'm not yet a fan of Windsurf or Cursor, but honestly Roo Codes out of the box personas for architect, and orchestration to spin up focused subtasks works well for me.
I am kinda treating it how I would a junior, to guide it there, give it enough information to do the work, and check it afterwards, ensuring it didn't do things like BS test coverage or write useless tests / code.
It works pretty well for me, and I've been treating prompting these bots just as a skill I improve as I go along.
Frankly it saves me a lot of time, I knocked out some work Friday afternoon that I'd estimate was probably 5pts of effort in 3 hours. I'll take the efficiency anyday as I've had less actual coding focus time in coding implementations than I used to in my career due to other responsibilities.