alt Hacker NewsI really dislike these AI middleman plans. The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero compared to directly buying from Anthropic or OpenAI, where 99% of the value is being delivered from. I don't understand why anyone would want to deal with Microsoft as a vendor if they don't have to. The short period of discounted usage was always the obvious rug pull.
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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 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.
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.
Some Opus models were free on Copilot, and in my country you cannot attach a repo to Gemini, that is limited to their premium offerings.
Except Copilot doesnt bill you per token like all those companies do, they bill you per prompt, at least Copilot in Visual Studio 2026 which is insane to me, are they just hosting all those models and able to reduce costs of doing so?
I also just saw:
> Claude Code to be removed from Pro Tier? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
I have thought about making a product out of something I'm building and trying to make the cost of my product a percentage on top of whatever I could resell Anthropic or OpenAI (or whatever) tokens for. I get this may be unpopular, maybe I should just stick with BYO-key.
It makes enterprise deployments much easier because most orgs already have github enterprise.
> 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.