VS Code Copilot for marketing, seo and investing

Yes, I use VS Code for coding. Together with GitHub Copilot on the Pro+ tier it’s hard to beat what you get for $40/month.

You’ll get the latest models and a reasonable allowance to use them.

But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

Aside from coding, I use VS Code more like an AI-powered automation environment where I can run entire processes end-to-end.

One of those workflows is for SEO.

It’s a three-step prompt workflow with file-system access. Copilot writes structured JSON files, talks to an MCP service I built to pull strong keywords for a topic, enhances and clusters them, and then generates articles based on those keywords.

It even aligns those articles with the rest of my content library. It’s basically an entire SEO pipeline running inside my editor.

Another workflow is for Reddit. I can search for specific topics using another MCP tool that fetches threads, then Copilot writes everything into my own database. I’ve got a tiny web UI wired up so I can reply to posts directly from inside VS Code. So that’s two separate marketing and SEO workflows — all running without leaving the IDE.

And then there’s the completely different world of finance. I use Copilot in VS Code as a Python sandbox that connects to Interactive Brokers’ local gateway to evaluate trading strategies. It can spin up scripts, test ideas, debug them, and iterate with me. Again, all inside the same environment.

That’s what I love about this setup: the flexibility. It’s not just “AI writing code.”

It’s the fact that I have a full folder structure, a development environment, tool calls, local scripts, MCP integrations with Copilot orchestrating workflows across all of it.

In practice, it’s way more flexible than what Codex, ChatGPT, or Claude can do in a chat window.

SEO deep dive

The setup isn’t anything crazy and that’s what I like. It’s all just text files, folders and a bit of structure.

It’s not as elegant as one of these pre-made SaaS solutions, but it takes you a couple of hours to set up and you can do whatever you like and avoid 10 different subscriptions.

It’s the age of custom of software and I’m here for it.

The files referenced in the prompt, will then explain whatever AI model you use, exactly what it should be doing.

For the SEO workflow the steps are roughly these:

1. Check what we already have on the blog and which keywords we are targeting

2. Detect keywords that might be missing and use an MCP to find good, suitable ones

3. Analyse competition and create article draft topics

4. Create articles and link them with each other

This then creates markdown files, which I can move over to my site to be rendered as blog posts.

Over time, this will hopefully compound to decent organic traffic.

I run this workflow every other week to create a couple of new pieces and then publish them.

It takes time, but I’m slowly making progress.

I’ve bundled up a full package with docs, templates, prompts etc. here.

https://www.learnedlate.com/seo-automation (sorry, I’ll charge for this as I want to gauge interest and support only those truly interested + I’ve spent a lot of time on this).

Investment Research

You could use Claude straight away to run some basic research and it would even write and execute Python code to crunch numbers, but this is nowhere near what you could be doing with a proper setup.

The latest models will likely know what to do if you give it the right prompt.

Some key points when dealing with financial data.

1. Use Python as it has better inbuilt data processing capabilities.

2. yFinance is a free package that accesses the free Yahoo Finance service.

3. Stick to the console instead of using a web ui for faster iteration. This is a general thing as if you let AI generate a UI it’s clumsy to tell it what went wrong.

4. If you have a terminal output, it can read what happened and iterate much faster in VS Code.

Here is a quick analysis I ran to decide whether to roll a covered call or get assigned.

With pure Claude Code, you wouldn’t have gotten to the same stage as easily.

I’m sure I’ll come up with more stuff along the way, but I must say I prefer this ten times over buying these highly targeted SaaS solution. Often times you start using them and then run into a wall of what is and what is not possible forcing you to move on to something else.

Hand-rolling stuff isn’t always better, but I’ve had good success with these three use cases in VS Code so far.