I wonder if managers will be as excited about AI when the prices go up.
We all know, and have known for a long time, that the AI labs selling dollars for a nickel are going to pull that rug, and up that price, at some point.
Copilot, though, has been consistently the weakest mainstream AI coding offering. Inferior to Cursor or Windsurf at editor completions, inferior to Codex, Claude, OpenCode, blah blah blah, at agentic coding and also the old-school chat-style...
And now, it's no longer cheap AND now sucks even more than it has all along — the new $39/month plan is not only worse than all its competitors, but worse than its own $10 plan was a month ago — by a lot.
The thing is, you can't jack the price up unless you're good enough — at least on some axis, to some customer segment — to jack the price. And when you're not good enough, and you have vastly superior competitors who are not doing that yet... you're just forfeiting the game.
Which I agree, Copilot should do — it's the Windows Phone of AI coding assistants, after all — it still seems weird to me to just commit humiliating suicide rather that trying to make some deal with one of those superior competitors.
Instead of just jumping into a dumpster and lighting yourself on fire.
I've seen some projects that use it and you open the PR page to be greeted by every PR having 3-20 comments but when you goto the actual PR, there's no one except the contributor with a bunch of Copilot feedback.
It gives a false message that the PR is resonating with folks and has real activity. I wonder if GitHub did this on purpose to make engagement seem higher than it really is.
It is time to setup local models. It is cheaper, and you already have a computer. Why keep it idle and pay someone else for their CPU?
[1] Ed Zitron speculates the actual prices with token based billing for heavy users will be something like 10x the subscription price, but this seems high.
Weird that Anthropic decided to build a Claude Code Routines toilet.
Between 27x model costs and this, CVE exploits and downtime their platform is starting to feel like a questionable decision.
Stopped my recurring subscription at the end of last year when it started spinning up actions for review. Which as a side effect doubled the time (or so) to do a review. Whereas before that I would open a PR, wait at most a minute or two and the review was already done.
I’m blowing through my 1000 mins in days.
Thinking to either pool some free tiers or figure something out with spot instances.
Also is it just me or is CI/CD tooling still sort of rough all around.