Posted by zorrn 1 day ago
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.
The number of intermediaries that some customers, especially governmental agencies, go through to get just an Azure bill can be wild...
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption... ) The upside: the EU finally got a prosecutor.
I get your frustration, and it pisses me off too, but no need to be rude to the commenter to get your point across.
> The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero
The value add is the GitHub integration. By far the best.
GH has cloud agents that can be kicked off from VS Code; deeply integrated with GH and very easy to set up. 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 and teams). 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. This is a pretty killer runtime environment for agents because you can fully preview and work on multiple streams at once in totally isolated environments.
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.
If you want to understand the value add of Copilot, I think you need to spend a bit of time digging into the enterprise account featureset in GH, try Codespaces, try Copilot cloud agents. Then it clicks.
On wait, nevermind.
Usage limits are/were higher in Copilot. They also charge per prompt, not per token.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
It was great while it lasted.
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.
Example zed issue https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/54219?issue=zed...
Just for context to the insanity, they allow recursive subagents to I believe its 5 levels deep.
You can make a prompt and tell copilot to dig through a code base, have one sub agent per file, and one Recursive subagent per function, to do some complex codebase wide audit. If you use Opus 4.7 to do this it consumes a grand total of 0.5% of a Pro+ plan.
Thats why this paragraph is here:
> it’s now common for a handful of requests to incur costs that exceed the plan price
> Claude Code to be removed from Pro Tier? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
That's the only reason.
In many enterprises you'd need to be very lucky to get an approval for any service that doesn't come from MS.
Opus 4.6 had a 3x multiplier in Pro. Now the new Opus 4.7 model has 7.5x in Pro+, which offers 5x more requests, but costs 4x more than Pro. So now Opus is essentially 2x the price it used to be.
It’s likely that Sonnet 4.7 will be the new 3x model in Pro — https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/changes-to-gi...
This whole thing is a massive asshole move, and probably illegal in all countries with a minimum set of consumer protections.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe, just maybe, the tool isn't suitable for all problem spaces.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
From a business perspective, why would I start thinking about which model to use, when I could cheaply always use the best model?
I mean at some point some people learn...
I was doing Opus for nasty stuff or otherwise at most planning and then using Sonnet to execute.
Buuuuut I'm dealing with a lot of nonstandard use cases and/or sloppy codebases.
Also, at work, Haiku isn't an enabled model.
But also, if I or my employer are paying for premium requests, then they should be served appropriately.
As it stands this announcement smells of "We know our pricing was predatory and here is the rug pull."
My other lesser worry isn't that Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multi, it's that the multiplier is quoted as an 'introductory' rate.
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.
I think this is really telling. The cost of AI has really been masked HUGELY to drive adoption. The true cost is likely to be unsustainable for the big complex tasks (agents running for hours+) that companies have been pushing.
I was skeptical, then quietly bullish on AI, but I'm now seeing signs the market is cracking and the availability is going to receded/costs balloon.
From my simple checks - and from Microsoft's own blog - per token pricing isn't going to be realistic for agentic coding either.
I get the impression that the intersection of HN posters and Copilot users is quite small in practice; that Claude Code and Codex suck up all the oxygen in this room. But it seems plausible we’ll see similar “true costs greatly exceed our current subscription pricing” from Anthropic and OpenAI someday soon…
I never understood the low visibility.
Expensive ram is annoying. I don't look forward to expensive ai.
I just found out via other news sources, and was surprised I hadn't seen it on HN already.
The change applies to existing subscriptions, some paid a year in advance.
> If you hit unexpected limits or these changes just don’t work for you, you can cancel your Pro or Pro+ subscription and you will not be charged for April usage. Please reach out to GitHub support between April 20 and May 20 for a refund.
They removed this now without notice but Wayback Machine still has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260420190656/https://github.bl...
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.
Opus 4.7 is available today for 7.5 credits per prompt.
They have also suspended new signups.
After testing all of the major IDEs/tools that integrate with LLMs over the last four weeks, I was happy to settle on Copilot. I, and others, seem to be a lot confident in that decision. Especially since there seems to be no refund path for people who prepaid for a year.
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.
I'm really curious where all of this lands, and if AI coding tools will be something that only a small percentage can genuinely afford at a competitive level.
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.
So:
- DO use AIs to build tools for yourself faster. If the AI goes away, the dashboard and scripts you made will still work.
- DO NOT build your business on top of 3rd party AI services with no way of swapping the backend easily. The question isn't whether there's going to be a "rug-pull", but when it happens. It might be sudden like this one or gradual where they just pump up the price like boiling a frog.
It's the sort of messy job that agents excel at. Decisions need to be made on free text data, translations done into multiple languages, ambiguity handled.
I now need to recheck it still works with another model, which involves a lot of manual verification; and potentially move to Claude Code and pay more money I can ill afford right now.
I'm not even clear from the post when this comes in, I'm guessing effective immediately.
This really hammers home for me the point that we should not be renting our tools.
My own dumb fault for trusting them, I will make sure to learn from this.
It's a shame because the VsCode copilot experience is quite good out of the box compared to all of the other harnesses I've used. But with typical lack of transparency, and sudden, harsh changes... What are they thinking?
After the restrictive rate limiting they've already instituted, I'm simply cancelling and continuing by using providers directly.
I've been using the Pro+ with Opus 4.6 very successfully and being charged 3x rate was mostly acceptable.
But removing Opus 4.6 and replacing with Opus 4.7 with a 7x rate is just insane!
It was clear (see the linked post from 70 days ago) that the current offering was unsustainable, but I'm a bit taken aback at how sharp the clawback is.
I was actually hoping they would change it to something that more closely tracks their actual costs so that they wouldn't have to rug-pull this badly. In particular what was really bad about it was that sending prompts to agents while they were working (to give them corrections) cost extra so I stopped doing that (after initially OpenCode didn't cause billing for that, until they became official).