> The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero

You are not their target audience.

The value add is the GitHub integration. By far the best.

GH has cloud agents that can be kicked off from VS Code. You can apply enterprise policies on model access, MCP white lists, model behavior, etc. from GitHub enterprise and layered down to org and repo (multiple layers of controls for enterprises). It aggregates and collects metrics across the org.

It also has tight integration with Codespaces which is pretty damn amazing. `gh codespace code` and it's an entire standalone full-stack that runs our entire app on a unique URL and GH credentials flow through into the Codespace so everything "just works". Basically full preview environments for the full application at a unique URL conveniently integrated into GH. But also a better alternative to git worktrees.

If you are a solo engineer, none of this is relevant and probably doesn't make sense (except Codespaces, which is pretty sweet in any case), but for orgs using the GH stack is a huge, huge value add because Microsoft is going to have a better understanding of enterprise controls.

I disagree. I like the standard interface, being able to easily switch models as things invariably change from week to week, and having a relationship with one company. That's why I'm a big fan of openrouter and Cursor. Not too much experience with Copilot, but I think there's a huge value add in AI middlemen.

> The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero compared to directly buying from Anthropic or OpenAI

Over here in the EU, we need to store sensitive data in an EU server. Anthropic only offers US-hosted version of their models, while G-cloud and Azure has EU based servers.

Copilot was there in AI based development first with tab completions.

Now, it may be the right call to immediately give up and shutdown after Opus 4.5, but models and subscriptions are in flux right now, so the right call is not at all obvious to me.

The agentic AI models could be commoditized, some model may excel in one area of SWE, while others are good for another area, local models may be at least good enough for 80%, and cloud usage could fall to 20%, etc. etc.

Staying in the market and providing multi-model and harness options (Claude and Codex usable in Copilot) is good for the market, even if you don't use it.

It was so much cheaper! I subscribed with the monthly plan instead of the yearly one thinking that the deal won’t last. It has last a bit longer than expected.

I exclusively use prepaid OAI tokens when doing copilot work in visual studio. It's really easy to set up a "custom" model. The consistency is hard to beat and I can use the latest model on day one. I also get to see how the magic happens in my provider logs. Every token accounted for.

> I don't understand why anyone would want to deal with Microsoft as a vendor if they don't have to.

It can bill to our Azure sub and I don't have to go through the internal bureaucracy of purchasing a new product/service from a new vendor.

Because if you’re a vscode user up until a couple days ago you could hammer Opus 4.6 all day every day and pay nowhere close to the Claude Max plan. Many people exploited this and the subsidy is closing.

I found the Copilot harness generally more buggy/disfunctional. After seeing a "long" agent response get dropped (still counts against usage of course) too many times I gave up on the product.

It doesn't matter how competent the actual model is, or how long it's able to operate independently, if the harness can't handle it and drops responses. Made me think are they even using their own harness?

At least Anthropic is obviously dogfooding on Claude Code which keeps it mostly functional.

Reading the comments here drives home an industry wide problem with these tools: people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can, and because they’re cargo-culting. This is perhaps the first time that software has had this kind of problem, and coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making.

I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.

Folks are complaining because they lost unlimited access to a Ferrari, when a bicycle is fine for 95% of trips.

I don't know what they have done to Claude, but when using through copilot it's truly awful compared to using it straight from the API.

I have always just used the API, but I decided to give copilot a go on the weekend because of the cheap price. And I am seeing weird behavior like I have never seen before... It will somehow fail to use the file editing tool and then spend an absolutely huge amount of time/tokens building a python script to apply the edit in a sub process... And it will spin it's wheels on stuff the API routinely just gets right in one shot.

I would also add that the models they supply through Azure Foundry are covered under my employer's existing customer agreement, by which MS is not allowed to train models on our data (which might include IP of the company or its clients). For organizations worried about that, it's nice & cozy.

It's understandable but sad that this will often be the reason.

Microsoft's USP in one sentence.

It’s got pretty good integration into vscode and you can bypass key anyway

I have to say this was how I used GitHub copilot in vscode. I Used opus 4.6 for most tasks. I am not sure I want to keep my copilot plan now.

I only ever used Copilot through OpenCode and for a while it was a crazy good deal. Quite possibly two orders of magnitude cheaper than API credits.

It was great while it lasted.

Opus 4.6 is no longer available and Opus 4.7 chews through monthly limits with reckless abandon. The value-add of GH Copilot is basically gone (at least for individuals on the Pro or Pro+ plans.)

Of course you don't NEED the better models, but figuring out what model you need can waste a lot of time and effort. Even when a cheap model is capable of a task it needs a lot more guidance than a more expensive one. They are also less reliable. You can waste a lot of time cleaning up after them. Judging whether something is good enough is hard work and rerolling with a more expensive model is painful. Judging the difficulty of a task ahead of time is very hard. Judging how good a model is for a given task even harder, especially when models and harnesses keep changing all the time. The real productivity boost LLMs provide is already modest and when you start tinkering with models it can easily evaporate.

>people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can,

While I agree with the sentiment, I think that might have been initially driven by older models being nerfed and/or newer ones were better at token/$. And there is this notion that those labs don't constraint the model on the first days after its release.

Claude Code doesn't have an option to use Opus 4.6 any more for me. It was great, but I guess now I have to use it half as much or upgrade my subscription again.

I'm in the same boat as you. Wish I had known this before my subscription renewed. There's no longer any value in paying them for this service when I can cut them out of the equation and pay the model providers directly.

If you cancel you get a prorated refund

They are for large corps with bureaucracy, big spend on anthropic is difficult to get approved but microsoft services get greenlit instantly

> This whole thing is a massive asshole move, probably illegal in all countries with a minimum set of consumer protections

Why would it be illegal in any country? Did you pay for an year upfront? Even if so they're offering a pro-rated refund according to the linked blog post:

> If you hit unexpected limits or these changes just don’t work for you, you can cancel your Pro or Pro+ subscription and receive a refund for the time remaining on your current subscription by visiting your Billing settings before May 20

Not sure where the expectation that a business should continue serving you at a given price till the end of time no matter what came from.

Using Copilot Pro with Pi, way better and smarter than using Claude Code. I haven't gotten a single e-mail and just wanted to use Opus (I use Sonnet 95% of the time with Opus for issues where Sonnet is struggling) and got an error message. No prior warning, nothing, I'm pissed. They just rugpulled all paying customers man. I liked Copilot because I can plan my usage over a whole month and I'm not "forced" to use it for a week before hitting limits unlike Claude and Codex.

The ux of copilot driving Claude beats Claude Code handily.

I never understood the low visibility.

Expensive ram is annoying. I don't look forward to expensive ai.

Indeed!

I just found out via other news sources, and was surprised I hadn't seen it on HN already.

> But it seems plausible we’ll see similar "true costs greatly exceed our current subscription pricing" from Anthropic and OpenAI someday soon

Enterprise might stick around, but individually, I reckon the developers will flock to OpenCode + open weights (Qwen/GLM/Codestral). The problem then is, if the open weight models impress these new adopters, they will shout about it from rooftops (conferences, social media, blogs) in unison, which might result in an exodus. Especially troublesome considering developers are a major market for both frontier labs (Anthropic & OpenAI) & its IPO ambitions.

....

Speaking as someone where he only 'real' option we have at work is Copilot Plugin, but I also use Copilot Plugin at home....

This is a shitty shitty shitty move.

As a personal user, I can now only use Opus 4.7 at a 7.5x 'Introductory' multiplier if I upgrade to pro+, but at work I can still apparently do Opus 4.6 at a 3x Multiplier on my work 'enterprise' account.

Honestly it strikes me as though someone at Github Copilot took Palantir's manifesto to heart; Screw the individual, consolidate power to companies on every level.

If they don’t give refunds I can just do a charge back. It’s not what I paid for.

Note that the 7.5x multiplier is only for the promotional period (until end of April), then it'll get even worse. If I had to guess it'll be priced at 10x.

I got in there quick yesterday with a refund once they pulled 4.6 and got my last month of about 1200 premium prompts free, nice.

> coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making.

From a business perspective, why would I start thinking about which model to use, when I could cheaply always use the best model?

Bingo. Github Copilot is mostly for organizations that have an existing Azure bill and would rather see that go up then get a new vendor bill. Professional middlemen.

Ah, the AWS Marketplace procurement model, where products mostly exist so that you can line item things through Amazon rather than going through a lengthy procurement process

Just use claude code directly with a pro plan instead of copilot for roughly the same cost.

On wait, nevermind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565

Yeah this was me. I just got a message that I hit my limit and now I am looking into what it takes to run Qwen on local hardware.

Good, I hope Microsoft lost a lot of money in the deal.

> Most of the time, Haiku is fine.

Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.

I think it heavily depends on how you're using it. If you understand your codebase and you're using it like "build a function that does x in y file" then smaller/cheaper models are great. But if you're saying "hey build this relatively complex feature following the 30,000 foot view spec in this markdown doc" then Haiku doesn't work (unless your "complex feature" is just an api endpoint and some UI that consumes it).

AI should decide the level of model needed, and fallback if it fails. It mostly is a UX problem. Why do I need to specify the level of model beforehand? Many problems don't allow decision pre-implementation.

> people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can, and because they’re cargo-culting. This is perhaps the first time that software has had this kind of problem, and coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making.

> I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.

You and I couldn't have more different experiences. Opus 4.7 on the max setting still gets lost and chokes on a lot of my tasks.

I switch to Sonnet for simpler tasks like refactoring where I can lay out all of the expectations in detail, but even with Opus 4.7 I can often go through my entire 5-hour credit limit just trying to get it to converge on a reasonable plan. This is in a medium size codebase.

For the people putting together simple web apps using Sonnet with a mix of Haiku might be fine, but we have a long way to go with LLMs before even the SOTA models are trustworthy for complex tasks.

Model selection for day to day tasks based on vibes is not very scientific. Micromanaging the model doesn't seem like a great idea when doing real professional work with professional goals/deadlines/pressures.

I think the reason is two fold:

- If you pay for unlimited trips will you choose the Ferrari or the old VW? Both are waiting outside your door, ready to go.

- Providers that let you choose models don't really price much difference between lower class models. On my grandfathered Cursor plan I pay 1x request to use Composer 2 or 2x request to use Opus 4.6. Until the price is more differentiated so people can say "ok yes Opus is smarter, but paying 10x more when Haiku would do the same isn't worth it" it won't happen.

Copilot is pretty unique in that they were only measuring requests, and that model is just broken for agentic systems.

Anthropic literally just removed Claude Code from their Pro plan today, so you're even more right than you know.

> more substantial changes still to come for anyone not grandfathered into a Pro plan

The change applies to existing subscriptions, some paid a year in advance.

> In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.

Warning: baseless speculation/theorizing ahead.

This is the consequence of LLM inference being really expensive to run, and LLM inference companies being really attractive to VCs. The VC silly money means their costs are totally decoupled from revenue for a while, but I guess eventually people look at incomings vs outgoings and start asking questions.

Previous big trends like SaaS apps, NFTs, blockchain etc were similarly attractive to VCs (for a period of time at least for the last two, the first one is still pretty attractive to VCs), but nowhere near as expensive to run so the behaviour of the companies running them wasn't quite the same.

Which providers do you use ? I find copilot's prices pretty hard to beat, but if there's something better I'll cancel too.

If you’ve ever had to be part of the frankly batshit insane procurement process that some organizations force you to gauntlet through, it becomes a very obvious and appealing option to do this

The Anthropic Pro plan cost double and gave you, I don't know, a tenth the usage, depending on how efficiently you used Copilot requests, and no access to a large set of models including GPT and Gemini and free ones.

From a friend in GitHub: they've been burning so much money because of Opus.

Been having a ton of fun with copilot cli directed to local qwen 3.6. If you’re willing to increase the amount of specificity in your prompts then delegating from a GPT-5.4 or Opus to local qwen has been great so far.

Most of the people using these models aren't skilled enough to make that determination. Seems rough trying to sell yourself as the thing that means you don't need to understand what you're doing but also insist that you understand what you're doing well enough to select an appropriate model.

I think Haiku is fine (e.g.) for any task that you could almost, but not quite, complete with (regex?) find and replace.

You give it 3 examples of the change you want, then ask it to do the other 87. You'll end up saving time and “money”.

This is the approach of Auto in Cursor and I've not been impressed with it at all. I think I'm always getting Composer and while its fast it wastes my time. GLM 5.1 in OpenCode is far better and less expensive, it can do planning and implementation both very effectively. Opus is still the best but GPT 5.4 (in Codex) is good enough too, and way more affordable.

I largely agree. But that goes back to my point (albeit with mixed metaphors): there are lots of people who are just hitting things with a jackhammer in lieu of understanding how to properly use a hammer.

I basically never just yolo large code changes, and use my taste and experience to guide the tools along. For this, Haiku is perfectly fine in nearly all circumstances.

Because judging failure is itself a complex task requiring a potentially expensive model.

This would require LLMs being good at knowing when they are doing a bad job, which they are still terrible at. With a good testing and verification harness set up, sure, then it could just go to a more powerful model if it can't make tests pass. But not a lot of usage is like this.

At the current cost, I just use the best model all the time. Why wouldn't I?

That’s certainly an opinion. Not one I agree with, but sure, if you entirely outsource all of your thinking to the magic box, then you probably want the box to have the strongest possible magic.

I don’t use Haiku for planning of big tasks, so we basically agree on that. But even just Sonnet 4.6, on a fairly large codebase, only truly goes into the weeds maybe 10% of the time for me. I also write pretty specific initial prompts, and have a good idea of how I want the code to work before I start prompting. For example, sometimes I will spend several hours writing a spec before even picking up the power tools.

I have never had the situation you describe, where Opus won’t come up with “a reasonable plan”, but your definition of “reasonable” might be very different than mine, and of course, running through your credit limit is an entirely tangential problem.

Agreed on both points. We’re dealing with a cost/benefit analysis, and to this point, coders have been subsidized, coerced…maybe even mandated into using the most expensive option as if it was a limitless resource. Clearly not true, and so of course we’re going to see nerfing of the tools over time.

Obviously we’re a long way away from being able to rationally evaluate whether the value of X tokens in model Y is better than model Z, let alone better in terms of developer cost, but that’s kind of where we need to get to, otherwise the model providers are selling magic beans rated in ineffable units of magicalness. The only rational behavior in such a world is to gorge yourself.

This is pretty straightforward compared to the giant universe of companies that resell Microsoft services.

The number of intermediaries that some customers, especially governmental agencies, go through to get just an Azure bill can be wild...

Not surprised to see this is common. At my company basically everyone and their mother are using Claude Code via Bedrock, despite us having company-wide Windsurf, Copilot and ChatGPT Enterprise accounts

A suggestion: Don't invest in any new hardware to run an LLM locally until you've tried the model for a while through OpenRouter.

The Qwen models are cool, but if you're coming from Opus you will be somewhere between mildly to very disappointed depending on the complexity of your work.

> Just use claude code directly with a pro plan

Usage limits are/were higher in Copilot. They also charge per prompt, not per token.

> Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.

Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.

I’m sure you’d find that Haiku is pretty functional if there were a constraint on your use.

> Micromanaging the model doesn't seem like a great idea when doing real professional work with professional goals/deadlines/pressures.

Remember that it's not only the cost per token, but also speed. Some tasks are done faster with simpler/less-thinking models, so it might actually make sense to micromanage the model when you have deadlines.

It’s deeply ironic that the folks who want to outsource as much thought to the model as possible are saying that my stance - use your brain to decide the right tool for the job - is tantamount to “vibes”.

OpenRouter-served models are often more heavily quantized than what you can run locally, or try for yourself on generic cloud-based infrastructure.

I’ve recently been unwillingly exposed to this side of things. It’s truly an insane, there must be a better way?

Well they charge per prompt, but with usage limits it is a mix of token and prompt. If prompt multiplier is higher, tokens are also multiplied, so limit is reached sooner.

It is basically a token based pricing, but you get alos a limitation of prompts (you can't just randomly ask questions to models, you have to optimize to make them do the most work for e.g. hour(s) without you replying - or ask them to use the question tool).

That sounds different, the parent is saying they're using that because then no new billing and stuff has to be negotiated/setup, but in your case everything is already setup and people have access, they just chose to use something else?

>> Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.

You were the one who made the claim that Haiku is fine most of the time. To any reasonable person, the burden of proof is on you. Maybe you should share some high level details about your codebase, like its stack, size, problem domain, and so on? Maybe they are so generic that Haiku indeed does fine for you.

If you're using the models to generate 99%-100% of the code, then it doesn't make sense to plug yourself into the loop as a bottleneck.

You are being deeply reductive and that's against the spirit of hacker news. The issue is that models are difficult to objectively benchmark. The benchmarks don't always align with real world performance. It's not easy and clear cut to determine which model will work best in a given situation. It boils down to loose experiences/anecdotes. Do you have an objective criteria for model selection that you have tested to be effective with reproducible tests?

According to https://claude.com/pricing it no longer is. They’ve explicitly updated that page to exclude it (it was on there before)

Yes, I loved my $10 a month person subscription for light coding tasks, it worked great. I'd use claude code max for heavy lifting, but the $10 a month copilot plan kept me off cursor for the IDE centric things.

I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong, especially when you hear the problem a lot.

Maybe, just maybe, the tool isn't suitable for all problem spaces.

I use models from Opus through Haiku and down into Qwen locally hosted models.

I don't know how anyone could believe that Haiku is useful for most engineering tasks. I often try to have it take on small tasks in the codebase with well defined boundaries to try to conserve my plan limits, but half the time I end up disappointed and feeling like I wasted more time than I should have.

The differences between the models is vast. I'm not even sure how you could conclude that Haiku is usable for most work, unless you have a very different type of workload than what I work on.

It was recently discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565

I use Haiku frequently, and for my codebase it is working fine.

But I'm not vibecoding, I don't let models do large work or refactorings, this is just for some small boring tasks I don't want to do.

Me too. Claude isn't the best option when all you do is ask "what's this error message", every 10 minutes or so.

More information required. What are you working on? What languages? How do you define “small tasks”? What are “well-defined boundaries”? What is your workflow?

Most importantly, define your acceptance criteria. What do you mean by “disappointed” - this word is doing most of the heavy lifting in your anecdote. (i.e. I know plenty of coders who are “disappointed” by any code that they didn’t personally write, and become reflexively snobby about LLM code quality. Not saying that’s you, but I can’t rule it out, either.)

The models are not the same, but Haiku is definitely not useless, and without a lot more detail, I just ignore anecdotal statements with this sort of hyperbole. Just to illustrate the larger point, I find something wrong with nearly everything Haiku writes, but then again, I don’t expect perfection. I’d probably get a “better” end result for most individual runs with the more expensive models, but at vastly higher cost that doesn’t justify the difference.

> I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong

I’m not saying that. If anything, it really doesn’t matter much what model you use, and it’s only a case of “you’re holding it wrong” in the sense that you have to use your brain to write code, and that if you outsource your thinking to a machine, that’s the fundamental mistake.

In other words, it’s a tool, not a magic wand. So yeah, you do have to understand how to use it, but in a fairly deterministic way, not in a mysterious woo-woo way.

its showing claude code as included in pro now on that page

They now tacked on an Editor's note to the blog post.

Someone else in another thread mentioned OpenCode, which looks neat at £10/mo: https://opencode.ai/go

“Everyone is special” is a snarky, derogatory comment we don’t need here.

Apparently if you believe them it was a “test”

There is A/B testing going on and for a while several pages on Anthropic's site did remove Code from pro (https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1srzhd7/psa_claud...) if you want a lot more details.

It’s not snarky. It’s literally the argument people are making: I am special, my use case is exceptional, therefore I need to use the special tool, even if you don’t need to.

A test to see if they could get away with it. I think we're really in the thick of token rationing right now and the fallout is going to be funny to watch.

Ah good catch. I like their CLI too. Though sometimes it feels like they take security a bit too loosely

they don't restrict you to using their opencode agent, you can use go in any other agent