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.
The number of intermediaries that some customers, especially governmental agencies, go through to get just an Azure bill can be wild...
I get your frustration, and it pisses me off too, but no need to be rude to the commenter to get your point across.
> The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero
The value add is the GitHub integration. By far the best.
GH has cloud agents that can be kicked off from VS Code. You can apply enterprise policies on model access, MCP white lists, model behavior, etc. from GitHub enterprise and layered down to org and repo (multiple layers of controls for enterprises). It aggregates and collects metrics across the org.
It also has tight integration with Codespaces which is pretty damn amazing. `gh codespace code` and it's an entire standalone full-stack that runs our entire app on a unique URL and GH credentials flow through into the Codespace so everything "just works". Basically full preview environments for the full application at a unique URL conveniently integrated into GH. But also a better alternative to git worktrees.
If you are a solo engineer, none of this is relevant and probably doesn't make sense (except Codespaces, which is pretty sweet in any case), but for orgs using the GH stack is a huge, huge value add because Microsoft is going to have a better understanding of enterprise controls.
On wait, nevermind.
Usage limits are/were higher in Copilot. They also charge per prompt, not per token.
It is basically a token based pricing, but you get alos a limitation of prompts (you can't just randomly ask questions to models, you have to optimize to make them do the most work for e.g. hour(s) without you replying - or ask them to use the question tool).
The Qwen models are cool, but if you're coming from Opus you will be somewhere between mildly to very disappointed depending on the complexity of your work.
Over here in the EU, we need to store sensitive data in an EU server. Anthropic only offers US-hosted version of their models, while G-cloud and Azure has EU based servers.
Now, it may be the right call to immediately give up and shutdown after Opus 4.5, but models and subscriptions are in flux right now, so the right call is not at all obvious to me.
The agentic AI models could be commoditized, some model may excel in one area of SWE, while others are good for another area, local models may be at least good enough for 80%, and cloud usage could fall to 20%, etc. etc.
Staying in the market and providing multi-model and harness options (Claude and Codex usable in Copilot) is good for the market, even if you don't use it.
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.
It was great while it lasted.
I have always just used the API, but I decided to give copilot a go on the weekend because of the cheap price. And I am seeing weird behavior like I have never seen before... It will somehow fail to use the file editing tool and then spend an absolutely huge amount of time/tokens building a python script to apply the edit in a sub process... And it will spin it's wheels on stuff the API routinely just gets right in one shot.
Example zed issue https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/54219?issue=zed...
Just for context to the insanity, they allow recursive subagents to I believe its 5 levels deep.
You can make a prompt and tell copilot to dig through a code base, have one sub agent per file, and one Recursive subagent per function, to do some complex codebase wide audit. If you use Opus 4.7 to do this it consumes a grand total of 0.5% of a Pro+ plan.
Thats why this paragraph is here:
> it’s now common for a handful of requests to incur costs that exceed the plan price
> Claude Code to be removed from Pro Tier? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
That's the only reason.
In many enterprises you'd need to be very lucky to get an approval for any service that doesn't come from MS.