When you use the API

There’s some exceptions eg Claude Max

> Copilot Chat uses one premium request per user prompt, multiplied by the model's rate.

> Each prompt to Copilot CLI uses one premium request with the default model. For other models, this is multiplied by the model's rate.

> Copilot coding agent uses one premium request per session, multiplied by the model's rate. A session begins when you ask Copilot to create a pull request or make one or more changes to an existing pull request.

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/copilot-...

Use other flows under standard billing to do iterative planning, spec building, and resource loading for a substantive change set. EG, something 5k+ loc, 10+ file.

Then throw that spec document as your single prompt to the copilot per-request-billed agent. Include in the prompt a caveat that We are being billed per user request. Try to go as far as possible given the prompt. If you encounter difficult underspecified decision points, as far as possible, implement multiple options and indicate in the completion document where selections must be made by the user. Implement specified test structures, and run against your implementation until full passing.

Most of my major chunks of code are written this way, and I never manage to use up the 100 available prompts.