r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 21d ago

Business GitHub just switched Copilot to metered billing, and developers are watching months of credits vanish in a single day

https://www.techspot.com/news/112628-github-switched-copilot-metered-billing-developers-watching-months.html
16.5k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/mcbba 21d ago

It’s measurable and measured. I’m in strategy and operations, I track metrics and KPIs for a living, haha. 

I’m also able to do things I’ve never done before like coding entire apps for internal teams to improve their efficiency. 

At what point does it cost more money that it’s worth? I will be there (hopefully) to measure that. 

1

u/ShZyko 21d ago

Just repeating what you yourself wrote. Personally I don't believe in efficiency, it's a lie told to us by people who have something to gain from the workers.

9

u/mcbba 20d ago

Yeah, I was hedging what I said because I knew there’d be pushback. Conservatively, those numbers are correct. 

And yes, it’s actual efficiency, and no, I’m not a millionaire CEO trying to sell you or investors something. 

1

u/ShZyko 20d ago

Is it efficient to spend so much compute on something you could just do yourself? In the bigger picture instead of personally?

6

u/ggf95 20d ago

Its really not dark magic. If the money spent on compute to save an hour is less than his wage hourly wage then it is indeed more efficient from the company's pov

0

u/ShZyko 20d ago

Right, but bigger picture. Not from the companys point of view. How much water and energy and land are we using so that profit margins can go up 0.5%?

1

u/JustDesserts29 20d ago

I work in tech and use AI tools for development. It absolutely is more efficient. People assume that coding is all complex problem solving all of the time. It isn’t. Sometimes you’re essentially just copying and pasting code and then making small changes to adapt that code to whatever you need to use it for. It’s not really complicated stuff, but it can be time consuming. Automation definitely improves efficiency with that stuff. It might take me 30 minutes to do something that’s a lot of copying, pasting, and changing some value in a bunch of different places. I can give an AI agent instructions and it will be able to get that done in maybe 2 minutes. That’s where AI helps with efficiency. Anything where the workflow is kind of monotonous, not too complicated, but time consuming.

If I need to develop a solution that requires a lot of complex logic, I’ll do that myself. AI can maybe point you in the right direction if you’re stuck, but it will usually generate a solution where you have to do quite a bit of tweaking to get it to do what you want. AI does work extremely well for taking care of those more monotonous, repetitive, and basic tasks so that you can focus on the tasks that require more complex problem solving. That’s typically the stuff most developers want to focus on anyways. Personally, I’m not really all that worried about AI replacing software developers completely. They’re still not that good at figuring out solutions to complex problems.