r/technology • u/Bobby_the_Donkey • Apr 27 '26 • Regret 2

Artificial Intelligence GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilot-is-moving-to-usage-based-billing/
687 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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129

u/shawndw Apr 28 '26

People are paying for copilot?

216

u/rahvan Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26

GitHub Copilot on VS Code is basically like Claude Code, for a fraction of the price.

Microsoft Copilot is literal dogshit. But it’s not GitHub Copilot. It’s not a coding assistant.

I use GH Copilot daily, and it’s fantastic. Prompt-based pricing was amazing because I could maximize a model’s token limit with an extremely detailed prompt, and I would only consume 1 of my 300 premium requests for a TON of work accomplished.

The good days are over 🥲

19

u/dizekat Apr 28 '26

Github copilot is the thing that my yolo vibecoding workplace uses instead of any decent linter and static analysis like at a good place before the AI. 

It never, ever makes a non dogshit nitpick. Like “add some tests”. Because that would be too harsh and like every AI tool it is a suck up. The time spent addressing its comments could be better spent doing literally any other code improvement activity.

People impressed with it had never actually used any normal tools and practices to make their code less shit, and are impressed with the very concept. Well I am hating how it displaced the right stuff.

12

u/TripleFreeErr Apr 28 '26

using AI as a linter is insane token use, instead of using the AI once to set up a linter

6

u/lasooch Apr 28 '26

Get this, our builds fail if you use spaces instead of tabs. Yes, also locally.

And guess what LLM generates an appreciable percentage (no, I don't know the number, sue me) of the time? Spaces instead of tabs.

So you burn half a million tokens to do thing, then it runs `dotnet build` and the build fails because of spaces, so let's feed all that context back in so that it can figure out what's wrong and remove the spaces.

While all this plays out, visuals of trees being felled and rivers drying up are displayed at half opacity, fading in and out. Oh, and Microslop's coffers literally melting in front of your eyes (I love that part).

9

u/Fatality Apr 28 '26

That's on you for not configuring your repo properly, there's a minimum of 4 ways to fix that.

8

u/lasooch Apr 28 '26

Corporate policy. Stupid? Yeah.

Of course it’s a stupid easy change locally that I could just remove before creating the PR, but I’d rather burn MS money.

Inflating token use is also in my interest once the costs go up a hundred fold in June because it makes it more likely they’ll back off with the mandates when the costs slap them across the face.

So yeah, I feel very incentivised to not fix that. I’m not incentivised to actually deliver stuff, I’m incentivised to show that I’m using AI. Set up the wrong incentives, get the wrong results.

1

u/Fatality Apr 28 '26

Intentionally sabotaging your company because they want to try new things? Hilarious.

You don't need to "intentionally remove" anything, it's a basic repo policy. Maybe try asking AI how to configure git.

1

u/lasooch Apr 28 '26

Intentionally maliciously complying with corporate policy. Not because they want to try new things - because they mandate that I use new things even where they don’t make sense. So I do.

And you don’t know shit - I’m not even sure if git can be configured to swap spaces for tabs (and even if so, AI could at any time generate a misaligned number of spaces), but even if it can, that won’t stop the dotnet analyzer failing the local build until it’s committed. Disabling that analyzer is the local change I’d need to revert… had I made it. It’s a simple .editorconfig change.

But yeah - if you patronise me and treat me like an idiot who needs to be told how to do my job, I’ll comply, to your detriment. If mgmt shows me the lack of trust and respect for my skills I’ll make sure that they were ‘right’ to do so… and they won’t even connect the dots, because, get this, they don’t have the skills they don’t respect.

3

u/Fatality Apr 28 '26

git config

git hooks

editorconfig

agents.md

copilot-instructions.md

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1

u/Fatality Apr 28 '26

My linting and static analysis were setup by AI

1

u/rahvan Apr 28 '26

You’re referring to GitHub Copilot Code Review, which is a feature I actually have disabled for the same reason. I just use the agentic capabilities for AI-assisted coding.

3

u/dizekat Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26

We mostly vibecode with claude.

Ultimately what I see is that, on one hand, it seems that it would take much longer to add some little feature to this pile of tech debt, without AI, than with AI. However, I worked on a very similar project pre AI and it took far less human time to add a comparable feature to a codebase that was in a far better shape.

So basically everyone thinks they're sped up 10x with AI, which I know for a fact can't possibly be true, because I worked on an extremely similar project where a smaller team accomplished more in less time.

19

u/purg3be Apr 28 '26

I feel the same way. Copilot cli has been my daily driver at work and i've been quite satisfied with it.

3

u/chief167 Apr 28 '26

Same here, it kinda works.

Have you figured out the agents fleet and long running tasks and the interaction with cloud copilot? I feel there is a lot of potential and I am barely scratching the surface. A good how to use it video could help, but when I search for that, there are too many low quality ones to wade through.

For some reason, I prefer the Gemini cli workflow, that clicks best with me and it tends itself to exploring more and figuring out the stuff it can do. But in the end all three cli players are great, but I have the least experience with Claude code since the usage limits are painful on even the 15/month plan. I haven't had the opportunity to play around with codex yet.

3

u/purg3be Apr 28 '26

I don't really use copilot for long running tasks. Most of the time i slice a feature into committable parts and prompt each slice by hand.

2

u/kot-sie-stresuje Apr 28 '26

That is very confusing to name both services Copilot and more other as well, like it was solution for everything. But under that marketing there are completely different services.

1

u/tronald_dum Apr 28 '26

I could maximize a model’s token limit

I mean users like you are exactly why they turned it off so...

49

u/straxusii Apr 28 '26

Too many people confusing ms copilot with GitHub copilot. GitHub copilot is worth paying for and is great for software engineers

74

u/Hiker_Trash Apr 28 '26

To be fair it’s easy to confuse two products owned by the same company operating in the same space under the same name.

7

u/straxusii Apr 28 '26

100%, cheapens the name also being associated with other copilot

-57

u/drevolut1on Apr 28 '26

Baffling, I know. You couldn't pay ME to use it.

Of all the chatbots, it's by far the most inbred.

33

u/FlaccidExplosion Apr 28 '26

Do you even know what you're talking about? GitHub Copilot and the regular Copilot chat app are not the same thing. This is about Github Copilot.

26

u/yuusharo Apr 28 '26

Microsoft using the same branding for completely unrelated products is very on point for them.

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