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I think quantifying tokens used is analogous to quantifying the amount of sawdust generated on a construction site.

Churning out useful code quickly is not solved by using more tokens per unit time. Most non-technical leaders can grasp this one and are likely more interested in the strategic game theoretical dynamics that are being forced by way of implied token consumption expectations (competition between developers).

If you want to hold out as long as possible and don't really care about anything other than the compensation package, you should at least play along with this new game in a half-assed manner. Try to goldilocks your token usage between any established extremes. You want to be in the statistical barycenter of every AI report that management can create.

> I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough.

And the tragedy is that this isn't sustainable, and we all involved deeply in tech know this. There is eventually going to be a big reality check the companies will have to pay, because you can't force creativity and quality, not even with AI, because actual intelligence lies with us at least for now and for the foreseeable future. However when the rope eventually snaps these executives at best will fall upwards, with big severance bonuses and a list of "contributions" we have to be grateful for. We are the ones that will suffer through the next big layoffs.

Anyone (including ANTHROP\C) "recommending selective use of cheaper models" is spending costly human time (which costs more over time) on correcting the machine (which costs less over time). This is a bad trade.

In cost per line of code, we have verified this is always an error unless your time is worth less than the machine (unlikely unless you consider your time to have no cost rather than considering it as your hourly rate).

The worst thing for our productivity has been Claude Code or Claude Cowork taking a complex problem and turning around and writing bad instructions for dumb model agents then synthesizing the dumb answers into an orchestra of badness.

The single best fix for results-per-total-cost is to ensure it reads and thinks about whole content, not snippets, and thinks with the smartest model, not agents.

Agents should toil. Agents should neither think*, nor decide what to think about which itself is thinking.

* Agents should “think” like ants or bees or beavers think. Any human-like thinking, *especially* intuition-like thinking, should be thought by the best model available.

** Nobody should be “churning out code”. In a hierarchy of coders who translate detailed specs to some computer language, developers who write software that ships on a project timeline, and engineers who accomplish business goals, engineers should “churn out” engines structured for business outcomes.

Measured by that, the machine is leverage while reducing a variety of costs. At the same time, because most training data doesn't grok this, the machine doesn't grok it either. So it needs you to shape its toil.

If you have such toxic environment, run.

This, I happily used the opus 4.6 fast mode to the tune of 5k for a project. The delivery of the project justified the 5k, if I only spent 500 but delivered the project 1 month later - I would have been in the dog house.

My real comment is, why were they not just using their self-hosted copies of it? Do they pay back Anthropic for use of it in Azure? Broker a deal, let Anthropic charge you drastically less to use their model AND Anthropic could have made Claude Code work directly with Azure for Microsoft employees. Pennies on the dollar, and Microsoft could do it using low use GPUs to save on cost, or stack underused GPU compute (this is how serverless was born btw - its the unused resources in a web server somewhere).

When you consider that xAI's old data center was enough to bring Anthropic back ahead, it tells me Microsoft could host their own on underutilized previous gen GPUs that are sitting there wasting server real estate.

> The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. I'm not willing to gamble with my livelyhood by using a less effective model.

I don't buy it. Old models such as GPT4.1 were faster than newer reasoning models, and their output was as good. Newer models end up wasting an ungodly amount of time with chain-of-thought steps which can be a complete waste of time if you have a structured prompt such as a plan or a spec.

My experience in the real world is that users have to ration requests, and x0 models actually tend to be used far more because expensive models are left for more complex tasks.

This, if you’re high performing, the company won’t question your use of tokens. If they want to limit it, they have ways to set limits on spend and usage.

For months, Employees had the option to choose claude code or copilot. Now they dont.

Underlying model choice still has no restrictions. Opus 4.6 is by far the most popular. there's still big $$$ bills going anthropic's way.

Most of us never had the option for work to pay for Claude Code -- some internal orgs did this. That being said I had a personal Claude Code subscription for a bit.

Honestly I find GitHub Copilot CLI (and now also the new GitHub Copilot app) quite decent. I mostly use it with Opus 4.7, or rarely with GPT-5.5. The VSCode extension is ok, but CLI or app are the better experience IMO.

I wish I could understand the appeal of using Claude Code inside VScode rather than Copilot. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

Maybe it's just Microsoft moving to more model agnostic tech within their copilot. I recently started using Microsoft 365 Copilot because corporate added Cowork which runs on Opus 4.7 which was better than the alternative we have available. Unlike the "real" Claude Code or Cowork this only has access to files in a specific onedrive folder in your personal sharepoint container, so it's much more compliant to things like NIS2.

Technically we're using Copilot and we're playing for it through Microsoft licenses, but it's using Opus 4.7. Even before this, most of our custom agents within m365 copilot were one of the GPT models.

Or maybe you're right and they want their developers to use the copilot models.

Microsoft have historically tended to dogfood their own products.

Obviously you want to be aware of what else is on the market, and use the right tool for the job -- but equally if you have a directly competing product, you'd prefer your org's telemetry and suggestions are directed towards improving your own software rather than your competitors'.

Copilot was great when folks were semi-attempting write their own coffee and needed auto complete.

There's a large (and growing!) contingent of people who don't write code these days. (Many don't even use the keyboard.)

Wonder if Amazon will do the same with CC and Kiro now that we internally have access to both.

I think Kiro might have some “first mover” advantage internally, but CC feels better to use.

Yeah. Claude does good work but reviewing it all properly takes quite a bit of time. It got to the point I started having trouble maxing out my weekly allocation.

Dealt with that by going all out and making an agentic parallel code review skill. Basically an infinite TODO list generator. Now I'm definitely getting 100% of the usage I paid for. It really burns tokens like nobody's business, and catches a lot of issues while at it. I've been looping this review/fix process every week. It's dramatically reduced the amount of stuff I need to pay attention to during my human review sessions.

The current thinking is automated agents is what turns this from an industry in the tens of billions to a multi trillion dollar one. So yes you are right on the money, agents stimulate demand for this thing they've built.

I think it's great. People at a broad scale are getting first hand experience with resource management. It's a fairly cheap way of doing it too (in contrast to: learning this by managing humans) and we can all benefit from the skill transfer.

At the enterprise level though, its going to be hard to want to use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training.

> There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious.

Colleague used Sonnet 4.6 on some pretty normal agentic coding tasks through AWS Bedrock to keep the data in the EU, 100 EUR usage in a single day. In comparison, the Mistral subscription costs about 20 EUR per month and we tested that for similar tasks it was okay, the usage got to around 10% of that monthly limit in a single day. Or Anthropic's own Max (5x) plan where you get way, way more tokens to do with as you please.

I feel like the sweet spot is having a monthly subscription with any of the providers (you're subsidized a bunch), but if you have to pay per tokens, now I'd just look in the direction of what tasks DeepSeek would be okay for, sadly probably not in the situation above. For a startup, though...

On the other hand, this feels a bit hypocritical:

> It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time, and sources tell me that Claude Code has proved very popular inside Microsoft over the past six months.

They're gonna say that the future is all AI... until they get the bill.

My experience as well... I've only hit Antrhopic's 5hr threshold a few times, and two of them was within a half hour of the window. Also, all three times I'd already accomplished a LOT.

I tend to work with the agent, and observe what's going on as well as review/test and work through results/changes. I spend a lot more time planning tasks/features than the execution, even using the agent as part of planning and pre-documentation. It works really well. I don't think people burning through the 5hr allotment in under an hour are actually reviewing/QC/QA the results of what they're doing in any meaningful way, and likely producing as much garbage as good (slop).

I'm really curious as to HOW the MS employees were using the agents as much as what they were doing.

> There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious.

By buying a subscription and dealing with the limits, using claude code and paying per token seems like the fast lane to the poor house.

I get 98.6% cache hits on Claude code. Short of drastic arch changes it’s hard to imagine it getting much better.

yeah, by using codex

---- Before it was:

Me: We need to do this this that.

Claude: <random stuff that approximates human outout>

Me: Are you sure?

Claude: Well actually there is a bug <more random stuff that looks right this time>

----- Now it is:

Me: We need to do this this that.

Claude: <random stuff that approximates human outout>

Claude: Let me consult the advisor on that.

Claude: advisor came up with some advice, adjusting according to that. <more random stuff that looks right this time>

So "Microsoft chooses to eat its own dogfood" is a more accurate title?

> Is this Hacker News or rather Marketing Wars?

No public forum is naturally immune to the spread of (guerilla) marketing. [1]

[1] Internet Rule #48

I don’t think people read the article, I didn’t until I saw your comment. The article feels like clickbait tbh.

It's a forum called Hacker News that's been hacked and covertly refactored into Marketing Wars. Being their primary goal is to foster a space to draw-in (marketing) projects/start-ups.

Por que no los dos?

Eso mensaje de hijo de Carlos

I rage canceled Claude today.

After 2 weeks of Claude getting progressively worse and worse, today was the final straw.

I don't care if they have a phone app. The model is COMPLETE garbage after you subscribe long enough and they think they've "got you".

I can't code on my phone if the model literally moves in the wrong direction and does the opposite of what I tell it to. If I wanted to make my code worse, I'd just randomly commit garbage. I don't need a mobile app for that.

Considered Gemini?

If you are talking about the Copilot built into vs code, that's not been my recent experience at all. Very capable in agent mode since gpt 5.4 came out.

its kind of weird tho, jensen also said we should be burning tons of tokens as well... 'perceived quality' cant be the only reason these ceos pushing token usage so hard can it?

They lay people off and look good in front of investors. Then they hire people, talk about "growth", and once again look good in front of investors.

This would never fly if stock market was rational. But it never is.

More expensive is a difficult calculation: faster can sometimes warrant the higher cost, if it means you can go faster to market. Also, LLMs work 24x7, and can be scaled up and down as needed. Faster to off board an LLM than to fire an employee (especially here in Europe). So, even if AI is more expensive than a developer, from TCO and ROI perspective it can still make business sense.

I suppose if it all works out it'll end up way more expensive than the employees the models displaced ever were. These kinds of technologies usually end up as an oligopoly at best, and those players will have a wide moat by then, and the things these models build will be tweaked such that no other model or human being can realistically work on them anymore, and then they can price gouge everyone to the brink of unprofitability.

> If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper

This is, in my opinion, tripe. SWEs are being laid off because of post-Covid over-hiring. The only evidence for labour destruction is in junior hires. But not because anyone is being fired, but because entry-level jobs are being cannibalised.

I suspect AI would have to get drastically more expensive before it starts looking worse than payroll. If one developer using Claude Code can effectively substitute for 2 developers, you are already coming out ahead at current API pricing assuming very heavy usage, your cost is going to be ~1.5x developer (factoring in beyond salary - benefits, PTO, the other overhead that comes with having employees).

So you're getting 2 for the price of 1.5. Scale that up to 500 devs at a big company and it's a big chunk of change saved on payroll.

Keeping your headcount or hiring humans instead, AI would have to start to cost upwards of $15k/month/developer or more before it costs more than hiring. You're looking at about 4 billion tokens per month before humans start to break even or are cheaper.

"AI" is just a cover for laying ppl off and saving cost. But the pendulum will swing the the other way and the companies will realise that knowledgeable ppl are still required to generate and utilize the generated code. No serious company can run with vibe-coded apps generated by laymen.

There is no profit, expense, revenue. Those don't matter. Only thing that matters is stock price goes up, and laying off makes stock price go up. When laying off make stock price go down, then laying off stop.

I'm not sure if you are referring to the old or new plan?

Github Copilot offered probably the best value and was IMO underappreciated for a long time; I've been an annual subscriber since day 1.

The changes announced a few days ago completely revoke that value proposition, I doubt I'll continue with it.

Copilot was the best deal in AI tooling for a few weeks there.

New pricing model changes that. I will still keep it around for autocompletion (for the rare times when I open up an editor).

Can even buy more premium tokens for more Claude use, which I have done once. But most of the time the tokens included in the plan are sufficient.

From the article

> It was part of an effort to get project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding for the first time.

I suspect they weren't as efficient as they could be with token use either. Sounds like they were trying to encourage non-developers to vibe code stuff

Copilot is the name for the harness / wrapper of MSFT products

The CLI can swap to whatever model (/models) based on your subscriptions.

The copilots on desktop or Office Apps are likely just GPT5 nano or other tiny models with cheap inference

Employees (at least on my team) get access to the Claude models as well when using Copilot CLI.

I disagree. As someone who just got a new Windows laptop with Copilot baked(forced) in I've tested Copilot a lot.

It. is. so. bad.

It feels like it's at least 1-2 years behind the current top models.

They do have agreements, but they aren't exclusive, and Microsoft and Open AI have had a rather public falling out over the last year.

1) They can still use Anthropic models.

2) Opus is not even unambiguously best at coding anymore. GPT 5.5 splits that title for some time now.

3) I would have probably done the same in his position. Dogfood the product.

Tokens are current era' "lines of code per month"

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

There is no world where I can put my company’s data through an external site without their express consent and security sign off. I suspect at most companies there’s zero path for people to have been paying for it themselves.

"incentivize to use as many tokens as possible" = "Upper management knows people dont like change so we are forcing them to come up with ways to use this thing". It does not mean that management will encourage wastefulness in the future, and it also doesnt mean that token usage from now wont be reviewed in the future. Whats to stop them from dinging your performance in november because you wasted a hundred thousand on tokens with nothing to show for it?

Okay, but what if you're not Microsofts size and don't have and R&D budget large enough to fund development of your own models and tools?

This is a warning to any company, not building their own AI, that AI assisted development could become really expensive really fast and most likely won't pay off. What Microsoft is suggesting is that the current price is to high, but it's still not high enough for e.g. Anthropic to be profitable, or AI coding tools are only as good as the developers using them. So you can't meaningfully do layoffs by replacing the developers with AIs, because the cost is to high.

How does Microsoft plan to fix CoPilot, so that the cost will be so much lower than Claude, that budget overruns won't be a problem for their own customer?

MSFT and Apple are taking the same approach.

The frontier model space costs 1000x as much to develop as the small language models, and is only 1.5 years ahead.

Factually, the frontier models have not paid for themselves. So, if you're MSFT and Apple, you don't need to run in a race where even the winner loses massively.

You can try to train models 1.5 years behind that are highly likely to be profitable, given your market position.

The average person is lagging behind what AI is capable of by 3+ years anyway...

So you can save 1000x on training and 10x on inference and just use SOTA small models.

Why spend $5B training a model that's for sure not going to make $5B (after inference costs) when you can spend $5M building one that WILL make far more than that after inference costs?

> attempting to build their own models.

At one point there were rumours that they'd do that. They also have the rigts to oAI models for a few more years still, so they could always use that but apparently they're also compute starved (like anyone else).

Curb Your Enthusiasm theme starts playing.

Claude code gets >98% KV cache hits. It’s not reprocessing unless you let the cache go cold (5 minutes, which is annoyingly short).

Microsoft does self host claude and gpt for GHCP

This is the smartest solution to do, to self host the model locally on premise.

I think so too, otherwise why wouldn't you put that (purported) increased capacity/output into improving your existing products or creating new ones, with the headcount that you already have?

This has really little to do with embrace and extend. They are not taking over an open standard or anything like that.

If anything, it's forced dogfooding, i.e., forcing their own workforce to beta-test their product.

Being able to mange context over long running sessions is a function of the harness, not the model. Are you using Claude Code with GPT5.5? Codex? piclaw? They’ll all have different context management strategies to let you keep going when you would otherwise have filled up context and be forced to stop.

I'm also a big fan of Copilot CLI, especially after demoing it to a coworker who liked Claude Code.

The absolute state of the Hacker News main page in 2026. Thank you for taking your time to put it all together.

2nd link doesn't work. That would be a neat tool, to find the original article and see how many levels of AI summary it has gone through, a game of AI telephone!

My bad. I had trouble finding the original source when I googled for it and grabbed a link. I was originally shown a screenshot of a x.com post.

https://archive.is/WfCta

Man, maybe it's time for me to give the verge a subscription. There the only ones actually doing any journalism here and a bunch of AI blogs skimming off the top.

boy i'm leaving the internet. sun is shining. was a good time here while it lasted.

The artificial centipede.

i swear i'm going to start an amish community and internet where we forbid any technological development past 2019

call me a luddite, i'll be wearing it as a badge of honor

Welp, this is the future we live in now