Comment by 7thpower
Do people actually use GitHub copilot?
At any rate, I could easily go through that much with Opus because it’s expensive and often I’m loading the context window to do discovery, this may include not only parts of a codebase but also large schemas along with samples of inputs and outputs.
When I’m done with that, I spend a bunch of turns defining exactly what I want.
Now that MCP tools work well, there is also a ton of back and forth that happens there (this is time efficient, not cost efficient). It all adds up.
I have Claude code max which helps, but one of the reasons it’s so cheap is all of the truncation it does, so I have a different tool I use that lets me feed in exactly the parts of a codebase that I want to, which can be incredibly expensive.
This is all before the expenses associated with testing and evals.
I’m currently consulting, a lot of the code is ultimately written by me, and everything gets validated by me (if the LLM tells me about how something works, I don’t just take its word for it, I go look myself), but a lot of the work for me happens before any code is actually written.
My ability (usually clarity of mind and patience) to review an LLMs output is still a gating factor, but the costs can add up quickly.
> Do people actually use GitHub copilot?
I use it all the time. I am not into claude code style agentic coding. More of the "change the relevant lines and let me review" type.
I work in web dev, with vs code I can easily select a line of code that's wrong which I know how to fix but honestly tired to type, press Ctrl+I and tell it to fix. I know the fix, I can easily review it.
Gpt 4.1 agent mode is unlimited in the pro tier. It's half the cost of claude, gemini, and chatgpt. The vs code integration alone is worth it.
Now that is not the kind of AI does everything coding these companies are marketing and want you to do, I treat it like an assistant almost. For me it's perfect.