Comment by taffydavid
6 hours ago
> I bought a GitHub Copilot subscription in 2023, plugged it into standard VS Code, and never left. I tried Cursor and the other fancy forks when they briefly surpassed it with agentic coding, but Copilot Chat always catches up.
> Here is the trick that you might have missed: somehow, Microsoft is able to charge per request, not per token. And a "request" is simply what I type into the chat box. Even if the agent spends the next 30 minutes chewing through my entire codebase, mapping dependencies, and changing hundreds of files, I still pay roughly $0.04.
> The optimal strategy is simple: write brutally detailed prompts with strict success criteria (which is best practice anyway), tell the agent to "keep going until all errors are fixed," hit enter, and go make a coffee while Satya Nadella subsidizes your compute costs.
Wow. I'll definitely be investigating this!
People get banned abusing this per request strategy so be careful. This guy was running super long prompts per request and is somehow surprised why they got banned.
https://old.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/comments/1r0wimi/if_y...
The author refers to gpt 4o and sonnet 3.5 as SOTA. I’d take the AI tips with a grain of salt tbh. But I’d love it if it’s true
It works with all models, some have a cost multiplier like Opus 4.6 ”charges” 3 requests per prompt, but its still only for the prompts you send yourself - even if it works on the issue for hours. GPT-5.4 has no multiplier i.e. costs 0.04$ per prompt.
Worth noting however that they are starting to introduce rate limits lately so you might struggle to run multiple concurrent sessions, though this is very inconsistent for me. Some days I can run 3-4 sessions concurrently all day, other times I get rate limited if I run one non-stop..
Thanks for the downvote kind stranger. Not sure what I said to qualify
You copypasted three paragraphs from the article and you contributed "wow".