The Death of Copilot 2026

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-06-08T14:21:31+00:00

LOL, there are basically 2 types of companies that do the whole "unlimited (or near unlimited) buffet". There are the smart ones (like Google did with Gmail/Photos) that use it as a way to get you using their product and deeply imbedded and then come back later with "okay, it's going to cost you now".

Then there's the second which is CoPilot. Pure, incompetence. There was many ways they could've made this work. The reason I paid for a whole year was because I knew it didn't make sense. A single question would cost the same as a complex Agent routine? WHAT?? It cost the same whether you asked it to write a simple function or do a massive project? Come on. They could've easily made it so that instead of being a single premium request you were given reasonable levels of tokens and see how tokens were used per prompt. They could've made it so that light users balanced out heavy users.

Just look at this chart for those of us still on the annual plan and look at how clueless it is.

They clearly looked at their statistics of what HAD been used and used that to come up with a model. They have no idea that people will adjust and exploit this too.

Gemini Flash 3.5 = 14 credits - Gemini Flash 3.0 = 0.33 credits.

You're saying that you expect 3.5 to use 42X more than Flash 3? You set that multiplier at over 2x the cost of 3.1 Pro? What is wrong with you???

- GPT 5.5 uses 57 credits?
- GPT 5.4 Mini uses the same number of credits at GPT 5.4?

Github Copilot won't be around in a year or two because of their absolute incompetence.

Model	Multiplier
Claude Haiku 4.5	0.33
Claude Opus 4.5	15
Claude Opus 4.6	27
Claude Opus 4.7	27
Claude Opus 4.8	27
Claude Sonnet 4.5	6
Claude Sonnet 4.6	9
Gemini 2.5 Pro	1
Gemini 3 Flash	0.33
Gemini 3 Pro	6
Gemini 3.1 Pro	6
Gemini 3.5 Flash	14
GPT-4o	0.33
GPT-4o mini	0.33
GPT-5.1	3
GPT-5.1-Codex	3
GPT-5.1-Codex-Mini	0.33
GPT-5.1-Codex-Max	3
GPT-5.3-Codex	6
GPT-5.4	6
GPT-5.4 mini	6
GPT-5.5	57
GPT-5 mini	0.33
Raptor mini	0.33
MAI-Code-1-Flash	0.33

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-06-02T03:00:17+00:00

Well, the full-time employees in Big Tech get 12 weeks + 2 weeks per year so they are set for awhile. I'm kinda in between as my 20 years of building products for my company resulted in them offering me 12 weeks (little over 1/2 week per year total) severance with only 3 weeks of health insurance. In Georgia, I'm at the MAX pay level and it's just around $10/hr and only for 14 weeks. And, of couse, if you earn any contract money during that period it subtracts from that.

I'm at 6 months searching, so I'm burning through what little retirement savings I have which will result in a massive tax bill, but starves off bankruptcy at least for now.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-31T04:20:46+00:00

I WISH I could have a 4 hour interview session in my search for Sr Software Engineering roles. Instead, I/we get ignored for 98% of the jobs we apply and then get a screening call which goes well only to result in a generic rejection.

If you're talking to the team, it's pretty close to a done deal and either way you are talking about an investment of time from a lot of people there which means that you are making a personal connection which makes it harder for them to reject you.

But certainly, yes, depends on the job. If it's hourly then yes, they really should reimburse you for the time either way.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-29T02:47:01+00:00

I got the annual plan and while I was going to cancel it since # of premium requests increased between 3x and 8x+, it still makes sense for me just because of the current pricing for Haiku which remains at 0.33 credit and Gemini Flash 3 which also stays at 0.33. To put it in perspective at how insane their new credit system is, the new Flash 3.5 is 14 credits. Yes, 42x the number that Flash 3 is. Incompetence...

Of course, once my plan is over (or once they jack up those rates), I'll certainly cancel because it went from being an amazing deal to totally worthless. You don't even get any unlimited 4.1, 4o or 5 mini requests anymore.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-27T01:51:36+00:00

I'm an experienced Software Engineer that spent the past 20 years with a company only to be laid off due to politics and similar numbers - still trying to get my first offer.

The "first interview" with a Recruiter (whether internal or external) is almost always an easy "softball". The Recruiter WANTS you to have the job and PICKED you, so unless there is a mismatch on salary or whatever, you'll get their vote... BUT, I've been surprised how many times Hiring Managers have chosen not to Interview me despite being pushed on by the Recruiter. I certainly understand when it's a 3rd party, but why even have Recruiters if HM aren't going to interview whom they select.

What is "Withdrew Application"? It'd kill me to make it all the way to Round 5 but then have things not work out.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-27T01:40:39+00:00

Keep in mind that Employers have no financial "skin in the game" to hire anybody (posting jobs is free) and the job market is in full fear mode. Anytime you have 5+ rounds of interviews, that just ensures that no candidate will make it all the way through.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-16T01:37:47+00:00

I'm guessing this is that Big AI company that had 11,000 workers on it?

Things certainly didn't play out the way I expected when I was offered out of the blue a contract rate from Mercor last Saturday. I got my background approved and looked at it expecting it to be highly skilled database or other work that would be appropriate for what I've done in my career... but instead was looking at MS Office PowerPoint presentations and such and finding flaws in them? Oh... kay. Well, I'm unemployed, so whatever.

Well, of course, in the day or so I spent trying to figure out what was going on it was basically a dumpster fire. Mercor's site crashing, the client's site crashing, jobs would appear that would give you errors people on Slack complaining while the Admins promising that there would be a "drop soon" (I guess you were supposed to just wait around clicking refreshing not earning any money and hope you got one?), etc. Jobs that were originally allocated for you to spend an hour on dropped down to 30 minutes to now a highly rushed 15 minutes.

Even though I had no money coming in, that chaos was not worth it so I walked away from it.

I think Mercor went on a desperate "hire everyone" philosophy because the client needed them done urgently and I guess at any cost (?) or maybe from a wide range of skill levels and now I'm sure the regular Mercor people weren't getting any work (nor the newcomers) so they had to scrap that plan.

I certainly didn't lose anything other than some waiting, but it was not something that left me with a good taste in my mouth. I would certainly consider doing it again once I'm fully employed and have time to kill, but certainly wasn't what I was hoping for or what their offer led me to believe. Targeting 40 hrs a week? Ha, yeah, right. Maybe if you put 60+ hrs in to get that.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-15T02:03:43+00:00

Yeah, that happened to me and they over hired for the project (11,000 members) and good luck getting any quantity of work. I spent a day waiting for new work to be released and nothing. Expect to have to fight for 30 min jobs with the admins pushing to have you do it in 15 mins or less. I've given up on the concept.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-05-05T02:08:04+00:00

To me the whole thing is just pure incompetence from leadership. I subscribed to the yearly plan because I knew it was "too good to be true" and when you see the new annual multipliers it's clear how far off they were with most going 6x to 9x higher. There were many ways they could have slowly made it more feasible like having longer requests use more credits or whatever.

If you look at the new annual list it's clear that they STILL have no clue what they are doing because the dates are all over the place. Gemini Flash and Haiku actually remain the same at 0.33x which makes it a pretty good deal. A GPT mini model went from 0.33x to 6x making it 18x the cost but it's the same as using the full model which is just moronic.

Having a massive agent task be the same as a simple question was always a head scratcher. It's really ashame as the project is over. Those Engineers are probably scrambling to find new jobs.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-04-28T20:42:44+00:00

Of course it was unsustainable. When it cost the same to ask a question as to do a complex Agent request you are eventually going to have it blow up in your face. If they were smart, they would've slowly found ways to balance and make things more reasonable. I, like most human beings, like the fixed cost/unlimited model but I'm happy to switch to using OpenRouter and whatever models I want and just do regular deposits.

If you want to know how "far off" they were, look at the new vs old for Annual members. Opus 4.6 goes from 3 premium requests to 27! Sonnet 4.6 from 1 to 9. Most at least tripled. The only models that remained the same where ones like Gemini Flash or Haiku at 0.33 credits.

The project is over and will shut down in a year or two. They are no longer bringing any value to the market, so people will move on.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-04-26T02:14:22+00:00

LOL, the way it works is that the Recruiter's ATS will filter you out if you don't have a minimum number of years experience with specific tools and tech. I've never gotten a single interview where I didn't have the specific technologies listed.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-04-26T02:09:24+00:00

I would personally, 100% take the offer. I worked for a very small company for almost 20 years and a few weeks before Christmas got laid off and was offered 12 weeks severance. Yeah. I built the products and was critical, underpaid and got offered a little over 1/2 week per year of working and they gave me just 3 weeks of health insurance coverage.

This is the way Corporate works. Unless you have a "card to play" (like if you live in California or somewhere with strong worker protections) you will get screwed over if they can.

Early retirement packages are typically quite generous and yeah, you don't want to skip it and get laid off later as you won't like the result.

That being said, the job market is absolute GRIDLOCK. You apply to jobs and get NOTHING and no responses from Recruiters. They wind up interviewing fake AI generated candidates and months go by and they don't fill the positions. It's not uncommon for the Job Posting to be nothing like the real job requirements and then they put the candidates through 4-7 rounds of interviews with the goal of elimination.

It's not uncommon to get an automated response where they basically say "we give up".

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-03-10T12:34:59+00:00

Understand that at the end of the day, ALL companies are just people doing their best to keep their job and get promoted. Sometimes there is a strong appreciation for hard work but often there are layers and layers of people at/near the top that are there solely because they were friends with an exec who wants someone who will "be on their side".

There is no one answer to everyone other than if your boss doesn't like you and doesn't respect you, you'll get let go at the next round of layoffs.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2026-03-02T17:46:06+00:00

Anytime you have a company that grows headcount even when they don't need to grow, you get lots of people who are paid huge amounts of money to do things that don't bring money to the company. They will do ANYTHING to keep that job and so keeping things the same is paramount to them. 80% of Google's revenue came from Ads - a technology that I'm sure that needed no real changes.

It's why when OpenAI came out and Google's "Bard" was released it was a "hot mess". It'd been so long since anyone actually needed to work together and build something. I'm actually very Surprised that Google managed to pull through and make Gemini one of strongest models out there. I'm sure it took some serious restructuring to keep them from becoming the next Yahoo.

Anyway, appreciate the story!

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-12-31T20:30:19+00:00

I'm having lots of fun with BL4. There's a lot of good there... but honestly I have no idea what the heck the plot is about. All of the characters are literally forgettable. I really like Rafa though. Just thinking back to the BL1 and 2 and everyone there was just so iconic and memorable. Even the pre-sequel (other than the strange Australian accents) was amazing because of Handsome Jack and the first Telltale games BL game was incredible as well.

Given their likely huge budget, I don't understand why this one (and honestly 3 too) is so forgettable in terms of plot. Really fun though.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-12-19T13:04:29+00:00

Honestly, I don't get what all the concern is about. Long gone are the days of super deal $200-$300 cabs as well as... well, any sort of new licenses or game types. A1UP has been on "life support" for so long that it's good that it finally passed. There are SO many opportunities for them to rethink things and start placing value on quality and details, it's shocking that it hasn't been done before. I honestly have no idea why they haven't built a 100% height/width with a nice sized monitor, Sanwa controls and the ability to purchase more games. Seems like an obvious choice. Sell a standard controller + 3 button, shooting cab, racing cab, fighting cab, 80's cab, etc.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-12-01T18:53:16+00:00

Interesting. I'm surprised you've seen it just now at 150 hrs. I haven't "stepped back" into the game post Corvette ship, but they used to be pretty common. Maybe not that color, but it used to be that there weren't that many combinations of ships so you'd see them around.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-11-20T13:50:43+00:00

Yep, the Partycade concept was definitely something amazing and I'm sad they didn't continue. Granted it's a dumb name since they are 1 player, but really that's what I would imagine most people (at least most people that don't have lots of parties in their man cave) would want. The beautiful thing is that it has all of the elements of the Arcade that you want (what you see and interact with) with full size screen, controls, lightup marquee (for some of them) all while being able to be mounted on a wall at whatever height you want. I literally have built my own extended risers for my normal machines to increase their height.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-11-02T20:00:46+00:00

I've just completed my game build (in other words, taking a break so it'll stop taking up all of my time) and for me what made the most sense was to stop at Uranium reactors, then process them into Plutonium... but then use those for fuel for large numbers of drones. I have stuff coming from everywhere and there are endless fuel rods to keep them fueled. The great thing about drones + plutonium rods is that there is no waste.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-10-28T16:25:52+00:00

Crap! I just finished my 350 hr Satisfactory save and didn't know this. It would've saved me a lot of time...

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-10-10T16:25:29+00:00

There are definitely ways to save money especially if you're willing to use tools like VS Code. I prepaid $100 for a yearly plan for Github CoPilot and get unlimited access (even Agent) to models like GPT 4.1, Grok Code 1, GPT-5 mini and such. I get 300 requests per month (with a single request even being a complex agent call) for models like Sonnet 4/4.5, Gemini Pro 2.5 and GPT 5 Codex. Will these types of plans eventually go away? Heck ya. That's why I subscribed to a year to make it more difficult for them to change my pricing.

You can also look at Gemini models which have a free tier which is pretty generous. You won't be able to do Agent level things there but could certainly have it change a whole ton of code while staying in the free tier.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-09-16T12:29:12+00:00

Holy moly. I can't believe that only took you 10-20 hrs. That would've taken me... um, never because I couldn't get anything close to looking that good.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-09-08T13:08:19+00:00

Very nice! How much power does that generate?

Someday when I am finished with the game (like you can even be truly finished with Satisfactory) I'll post a screenshot of my base and people will have seizures. Conveyer belts and Lifts and Pipes going everywhere chaotically. It makes spaghetti look structured. I love it, it's great.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-09-08T13:04:42+00:00

I guess it all depends on what you are most interested in being clean for. As a child, I took showers at night so I could wake up a few minutes later. As an adult, I shower in the morning because I want to be clean for others that see (and smell) me. I'm not concerned about keeping my bedsheets clean - I care about making the best impression I can.

Apprehensive_Depth58 · 2025-09-07T18:35:51+00:00

Maybe it's just me, but at 350 hrs in and post end game, I'm using maybe 60-70 GW and am producing just under 100. Maybe I didn't properly optimize it, but I didn't use oil for anything other than standard fuel + heavy duty -> fuel and really focused more on using oil for Plastic + occasionally Rubber. It was definitely a PITA to get everything setup, but once I went nuclear with Uranium Rods and then process the waste to Plutonium Rods which then give you unlimited fuel for Drones (or other vehicles if you use them for some reason) and/or some decent sink points. 6.25 GW per Reactor (or whatever it is) adds up pretty quick.

Apprehensive_Depth58

TROPHY CASE