Good-bye Github Copilot May 31, 2026
Back in 2015, when I was working for a company called Enova International, I correctly predicted the current state of AI, including models that had the capability to code. This was a contentious opinion among my teammates. Only one of them (and my boss) could comprehend my vision of the future. All the rest argued that it would never happen and that what I was describing was simply a different type of domain-specific language. We had several arguments about this, and clearly, in the end, I turned out to be correct.
Naturally, when GitHub Copilot was announced, I wasn't at all surprised and jumped at the opportunity to sign up—I was an extremely early adopter of this tool, and I've maintained an active GitHub Copilot Pro account since it became an option.
At that time, GitHub (Microsoft) claimed their goal was not to replace the programmer, only augment them. I knew this was a falsehood at worst, wishful thinking at best, and was waiting patiently for the tool to improve to the point that automated agents became viable.
That finally happened several months ago, and of course, GitHub has now changed their pricing structure to token-based usage, and now I have to cancel my plan because it is unaffordable. What once cost a flat rate of $39 would now cost me over $1,200 (assuming I used all 1,500 requests that were included in the flat-rate plan).
This means I have to move my business entirely to DeepSeek, which is the only model that will be able to work on my projects with similar performance at an affordable price.
Thankfully, my main project (AI Runner) is open source, so using a Chinese model is a viable option here, but this is a real problem, and I'm curious to see how it affects software companies moving forward.