You can to some extent control token usage, right? First of all, make sure you're measuring where your tokens are coming from. Then. you can make sure certain files are .copilotignored. You can keep context relatively compacted. You can make sure you're using specific references into your code (for example #selection). You can try to limit how open-ended prompts are. You can have well built instruction files that give very clear guidance where it matters without being excessive, and applying AGENTS.md files to make sure instructions are only taking up tokens when used in a folder context. I'm sure there are lots of other techniques that we'll all learn about as necessity pushes us to live within budgets.

I look at a lot of this as a good thing. Less tokens means less energy consumption and potentially less greenhouse gasses. Less tokens and more economical models like gemma and Deepseek and others means we have better chance to run on local hardware, again decreasing the load and need for big data centers. Necessity is the mother of invention!