alt Hacker NewsWhose idea was this “premium request” model anyway? If you’re going to invent a new metric used to bill, why not align it with what, even at the time, was a clear underlying cost structure that GitHub actively chose to ignore for a more confusing system.
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This approach started with the “Ask a question about your code” feature, which is more comparable to single chat message with relatively predictable token usage. Now it’s an agent who might work for 30 minutes, read the whole codebase, and write 1000 lines
I'm not usually a Conspiracy Guy, and the answer is probably `incompetence * tech_debt`. But I think that having sufficient layers of abstraction to any billing model is a useful way to hide the real cost of things. It's why it's done everywhere.
It made more sense in the ye old days where a request was basically just a chat message in a sidebar and it could also edit code. Then saying someone can use 300 chat messages a month kinda makes sense.
Turns out when a request can spawn tens of subagents and use millions of tokens over many turns of toolcalls then suddenly github copilot has a massive financial problem on their hands.