Yeah, I think it is pretty obvious at this point that users have gotten over their skis a bit on the fixed rate plans. I suspect a lot of folks were playing around with agentic workflows on a $10-200/month plan and then started implementing them at their companies under enterprise accounts not realizing that API based billing would result in easily 10-100x the costs. Running hundreds of agents 24/7 is all fun and games when you can do it for beer money. Not as fun when it is super yacht money.
As an anecdote, Github is changing their copilot plan to usage based billing next month. They released a tool that allows their users to estimate what their bills will look like under the new plan based on their past usage. There are some screenshots online from users showing their plans will go from $40/month to $3-5k/month. I imagine this is happening everywhere. These tools absolutely can do more than they were capable of just six months ago. But if the true costs are as high as it appears, folks are going to be much more judicious with how they use them moving forward.
I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.
But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.
AFAICT this is already baked into the GitHub Copilot agent. I read its sessions pretty often and reviewing/testing after writing code is a standard part of its workflow almost every time. It's kind of wild seeing how diligent it is even with the most trivial of changes.
AI chat for research is great and really helps me.
I just don't need the AI writing code for me, don't see the point. Once I know from the ai chat research what my solution is I can code it myself with the benefit I then understand more what I am doing.
And yes I've tried the latest models! Tried agent mode in copilot! Don't need it!
Honestly, tab nine is the reason why I didn’t use Copilot for months after I was given initial access — it was just so atrociously bad at what it claimed to help that I was expecting the same from Copilot and thought the concept itself was a broken one. Then out of the blue a coworker mentions he got access to Copilot and loved it, so I gave it a try. Turns out, Copilot just makes things so much easier. I love it. I’m not sure if I’ll pay the subscription right away, but I’m certain I’ll notice the constant annoyance of it missing.
