There are some advantages. 1) Cost. More people have ChatGPT/Claude than CoPilot. And it's cheaper to load large contexts into ChatGPT than into the API. For e

There are some advantages. 1) Cost. More people have ChatGPT/Claude than CoPilot. And it's cheaper to load large contexts into ChatGPT than into the API. For example, o1-preview is $15/million tokens. And it's a fixed $20/m that someone can use for everything else as well. Of course, there are times when I just use the VS Code plugin via API as well. 2) I want to stay in VS Code. So that excludes some of the options you mentioned 3) I don't find tiled VSCode + ChatGPT much of a hindrance. 4) Things might have improved a bit, but previously the Web-based chat interface was more refined/mature than the integrated interface.