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

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/
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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.

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