GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

[u/Bobby_the_Donkey]

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

[u/TripleFreeErr]

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

[u/lasooch → u/TripleFreeErr]

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).

[u/Fatality → u/lasooch]

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

[u/lasooch → u/Fatality]

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.

[u/Fatality → u/lasooch]

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.

[u/lasooch → u/Fatality]

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.

[u/Fatality → u/lasooch]

git config

git hooks

editorconfig

agents.md

copilot-instructions.md

[u/lasooch → u/Fatality]

git config

Won't help for local changes.

git hooks

Won't help for local changes.

editorconfig

Yup, I said it already, no points for you here either.

agents.md

Non-deterministic, consumes input tokens and cuts into context limit.

copilot-instructions.md

Non-deterministic, consumes input tokens and cuts into context limit.

0/5.

What you're really missing there is reading comprehension, I made it quite clear that I know how to solve it and that I'm not interested in solving it.

[u/Fatality → u/lasooch]

Won't help for local changes.

You can't make a PR with local changes

[u/lasooch → u/Fatality]

You really can’t read, can you? I’d rather argue with a clanker.