Switching Harnesses Without Starting Over: Claude Code to Copilot in VS Code

About this event

You’ve spent a year tuning Claude Code: skills, hooks, a plugin you can’t work without. Then Monday comes, you open the client laptop, and the agent on it is GitHub Copilot in VS Code. Most of us feel clumsy for weeks. Few admit it. Microsoft's Benjamin Clark and Tyler Kendrick will show how to switch harnesses without starting over, and which Copilot features make the switch worth it. What you’ll learn (the November 2026 edition): • What carries over from Claude Code (skills, plugins, commands, hooks, MCP servers) and what doesn’t, yet • How the harness picker works, with Copilot, Claude and Codex agents side by side in VS Code • How to run and review several agent sessions in parallel with the Agents window and the GitHub Copilot app • The Copilot features worth switching for, including the ones you’d never discover on your own • A practical path to being productive in your first week Why this matters: many of us don’t choose our tools at work. The client or the enterprise does. Being productive in whichever harness is on the desk is becoming a career skill, not a preference. Before you join, have VS Code and Copilot installed (the free plan works), and think about: • Which Claude Code skills, commands, hooks or plugins can’t you work without? • What’s in your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, and how is it organized? • Does your company limit which models or MCP servers you can use? Then bring your hard questions for the Q&A. Friday\, November 13 \| 12:00\-1:30 PM ET \| Virtual \(Zoom\) lunch\-and\-learn with a live demo\. Grab your lunch and join us! Agenda • 12:00 - 12:05 PM: Welcome and community updates • 12:05 - 12:45 PM: Main presentation and demo • 12:45 - 1:25 PM: Q&A and discussion • 1:25 - 1:30 PM: Wrap-up and Manning Publications raffle Homework (optional reading before the session): Start here: • Tutorial: Agentic coding in VS Code (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/agents-tutorial) • Agent harnesses (the harness picker) (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/run/agent-harnesses) • VS Code Agents window: Orchestrate agents across every project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov7cdtl_Qtw) What carries over from Claude Code: • Agent skills (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agent-customization/agent-skills) • Custom instructions (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agent-customization/custom-instructions) • Agent plugins (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agent-customization/agent-plugins) • Hooks (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agent-customization/hooks) Slash commands side by side (skim both lists): • Claude Code (https://code.claude.com/docs/en/commands) • Copilot in VS Code (Slash commands section) (https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/agents/reference/ai-features-cheat-sheet) Many work the same way: /init, /clear, /compact, /plan, /fork, /rename, /help, /agents, /skills, /hooks, and /skill-name to run a skill. From Benjamin: • Benjamin at Mastercard’s Developer Innovation Week (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benjamin-i-clark-31869b126_developerinnovationweek-githubcopilot-activity-7505373773555044353-Nr93) About the speakers: Benjamin Clark is a Senior Cloud & AI Solution Engineer in Microsoft’s Specialist Team Unit, focused on developer experience, GitHub and GitHub Copilot for financial services organizations. Before that, he spent years as a Microsoft consultant building solutions alongside developers. He recently presented GitHub Copilot CLI to an audience of 800+ developers, and spoke at the keynote of Mastercard’s Developer Innovation Week. Tyler Kendrick is a Senior Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, based in Chicago, where he helps enterprises modernize applications and build AI solutions on Azure. Before Microsoft, he was a Principal Enterprise Architect at Northern Trust, leading strategy on developer experience, DevSecOps and cloud modernization. Serverless Toronto has been bridging the gap between IT and business needs since 2018. 6,000+ members. Past sessions: youtube.serverl