Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update

I currently use LLMs as a glorified Stack Overflow. If I want to start integrating an LLM like Gemini 2.5 PRO into my IDE (I use Visual Studio Code), whats the best way to do this? I don't want to use a platform like Cursor or Claude Code which takes me away from my IDE.

GitHub Copilot is pretty easy to try within VS Code

Cursor is an IDE. You can use its powerful (but occasionally wrong) autocomplete, and start asking it to do small coding tasks using the Ctrl+L side window.

I don't want to leave my IDE

I want to use Gemini 2.5 PRO. I was an early tester of Copilot and it was awful.

Thank you! When I was testing out Copilot I was stuck with whatever default LLM was being used. Didn't realize you could switch it out for a non-MS/OpenAI model.

Copilot has 2.5 Pro in the settings in github.com, along with claude 4

Worth noting that Cursor is a VS Code fork and you can copy all of your settings over to it. Not saying that you have to, of course, but that it's perhaps not as different as you might be imagining.

Does running a Claude Code command in VSCode's integrated terminal count as leaving your IDE?

(We may have differing definitions of "leaving" ones IDE).

I don't either but unfortunately Cursor is better than all the other plugins for IDEs like JetBrains. I just tab over to cursor and prompt it, then edit the code in my IDE of choice.

In my testing Sonnet 4 is far better than any of the Google or OpenAI models.

There's a gemini vscode plugin that does autocomplete and chatbot modes:

https://cloud.google.com/gemini/docs/codeassist/write-code-g...