Finally an alternative to the big dogs that a company can use. People have been asking for a way to run the Chinese models from a trusted provider. Here GitHub delivered!
The performance, if we trust the benchmarks, put it at Sonnet 4.6.
Is GitHub Copilot the best positioned platform for enterprise? They support Claude, GPT, Gemini, and now even open weight models. Larger orgs are paying at API rates anyway so it costs just as much as anywhere else. They have a pretty good agent CLI and SDK, and now a desktop app. They have hosted agents, and you can run their 'Agentic Workflows' in CI.
Has their reputation tanked so much that the alternatives get all the buzz? Or is it that non-enterprise users are priced out by the usage costs, so no free marketing?
I used GitHub Copilot for my VS 2026 development and switched between ChatGPT and Claude. That was before I discovered Claude Code and the Codex app. Copilot was OK for my purposes, and the USD 10 per month fee was enough for my usage.
However, last month they introduced a new pricing model ( I know the old pricing was not sustainable), and my USD 10 was exhausted within days. Because of that, I switched to Claude Code and Codex and have never looked back. Yes, tokens on Claude Code and Codex are subsidized heavily, but let's just enjoy when good things last.
I do feel there is a difference between using Claude via Copilot versus using Claude directly in Claude Code. I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing behind the scenes.
I am a huge fan of Copilot CLI. It just feels so logical and low-friction to use compared to Claude Code. Having the ability to juggle various models at will is really nice too. ("Plan this using Opus 4.6, let GPT 5.4 verify the plan and give feedback before implementing with Sonnet 4.6").
Unfortunately the June pricing change for Copilot forced me personally as well as my entire department at work to switch to Claude Code. With copilot we were hitting a few dollars of extra spend over the included credits in April and May, then in June we started chewing through the monthly budget every 2-3 days.
Just a completely insane price hike from the customer's perspective, I don't know what MS were thinking there.
Even if that is the price they need to be sustainable they should have waited until the competition changed their prices first. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot lost 50% or more of their customer base last month.
Eventually this could be where all the major players set their prices, so the thought occurs to me that nations should run some form of "public access AI", just like they did for TV. Use the free open models and use tax money to finance a few datacenters. Geo-lock the use and set strict throttles to manage load, but let school children and citizens use that AI freely otherwise.
If Copilot's pricing is the level for all AI in a few years, only the unicorn companies can afford to use them, and everybody else has no chance of competing with a company that can use AI.
Copilot's main target is probably enterprises, who already pay per token with both Claude and Codex, on top of a per-seat subscription. With Copilot they get both Claude and Codex and many other models in one subscription. Also, per-seat price includes usage and the cost of extra usage is identical to going direct with model providers. I'd say it makes sense.
A very sharp slap in the face of those of us who kept our annual plans and didn't ask for s refund: It seems it will not be available to annual subscriptions.
Gotta say, I've lost all interest in cloud-based AI products. Too many cool features and workflows that I was once excited about that I can't or don't use anymore for a variety of reasons (price hikes, subjectively nerfed, disappeared altogether, replaced,...) for me to even remember. It's tiring.
I've set up a small rig, mostly settled on Qwen3.6 and I'm slowly adding features myself. It probably can't compete with Claude. I don't even know, I've stopped checking. It's providing a ton of value to me as is, and it only keeps getting better. All it takes is to realize that it doesn't actually matter if the grass is (maybe even objectively) greener somewhere else. Feels so good to know that it won't change under my feet. I've got this amazing, highly extensible tool, and it's mine.
People want to make it seem like you need to always use the latest and greatest frontier models to be taken seriously as a developer.
You really don’t need them. After a certain point, bigger models give diminishing returns. If you can get 80% of the productivity gain with a free local model, use the local model. It will still be way faster than doing everything by hand, but you also don’t have to pay for tokens to a cloud provider and the tools won’t be ripped away from you on a whim.
This is the new attitude enlightened people should adopt. Reject the arms race.
I'm really happy this is one of the top comments here, I am fully local as well.
Just wanted to leave a note for folks who might not have the memory to run a big 32gb model - I just found out there are some pruned models that have really good performance and If I had a smaller machine I might try this pruned unsloth Q4 quant of GLM 4.7 flash that sits at 14gb:
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/GLM-4.7-Flash-REAP-23B-A3B-GG...
I usually use LM Studio for this type of thing but unsloth has their own studio type app that might be even better suited for these quants.
I used GLM 4.7 flash as my main model for months and it was an incredibly tenacious model and very very fast - I think on restricted hardware, this could be a great choice.
It's a good model for sure, but it's training set is based on some pretty old stuff. Would be good to post-train any languages / frameworks you care about being current into a LoRA for it. I even had to do that for the newer Qwen3.6, but it wasn't too hard thanks to Unsloth.
Same here, been happy throwing Qwen3.6 on my old MBP - no it's not as fast as Claude which I use at work, but it works well enough locally and I don't have to worry about credits or shit like the rug getting pulled under me in terms of capabilities.
I often feel like we're nowadays mostly pushing AI developments in the ways of finetuning differences. Like how new editions of Claude are tuned for agentic coding which might even be detrimental if you're using it for non-agentic coding. Or how Fable 5 in fact do look great but at a huge cost for inference and a high likelihood of post-launch nerfs or limit/price revisions. How Gemini 3.5 has more liberal limits but on the other hand underperforms a bit.
It's like we're mostly treading mud at this point. New editions are released, a version number increases, but I have to wonder if all steps are forward or they're more just tuned differently with similar actual perf per dollar as when this year began.
Most in fact seem to be happening to me with small models. Like your Qwen. Or Gemma 4 31B which is kinda magic especially when considering multilingual abilities. So yes, in that sense I can see "development" probably as we refine data sets and training methods but I see it less on the big hulking beasts with daily limits (unless you turn it up to 11 like Fable).
Edit: As I posted this, I saw a "before and after" comparison for Fable and the reintroduced version is seeing a catastrophic drop in BridgeBench performance as they're still mucking with the model. Go figure... https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2072692225100612032
And why should one prefer GitHub Copilot over OpenCode? Worse harness, more expensive prices, unreliable product strategy, limited model support, the list goes on.
For any small team wanting to try Copilot, heed my warning that you will waste hours navigating their billing settings using various out-of-date documentation. Long story short, I finally got an email from them saying that "Copilot Business is available for teams purchasing 10 or more licenses". This is undocumented but other people are reporting the same: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/199346
We're sticking with Cursor for now, using Kimi as our daily driver (branded as "Composer").
Much better value by using K2.7 Code with GitHub cli via opencode subscription - at $10/month gives you $60 worth of usage (for now) - you get $5 usage credits per day (with some weekly / monthly limits)
41 comments
[ 399 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadThe performance, if we trust the benchmarks, put it at Sonnet 4.6.
Let’s see if it’s worth it with GitHubs pricing.
Saw in a discussion on Reddit that the team is evaluating glm5.2 so hopefully more to come!
Has their reputation tanked so much that the alternatives get all the buzz? Or is it that non-enterprise users are priced out by the usage costs, so no free marketing?
https://fireworks.ai/blog/kimi-k2p7-code
I don’t know much about them but they did a deal with Microsoft in March:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-fireworks...
However, last month they introduced a new pricing model ( I know the old pricing was not sustainable), and my USD 10 was exhausted within days. Because of that, I switched to Claude Code and Codex and have never looked back. Yes, tokens on Claude Code and Codex are subsidized heavily, but let's just enjoy when good things last.
I do feel there is a difference between using Claude via Copilot versus using Claude directly in Claude Code. I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing behind the scenes.
Cache hit (most important): $0.19
Output: $4.00
This is the same as how much Moonshot charges for it, and it puts it at roughly the price of GPT 5.4 mini, not a bad option.
For some context here is a stupid prompt that wastes tokens: "Play a game of tic tac toe against yourself on a 5x5 board, you need 5 in a row to win."
It costs $0.006 on Kimi K2.7, and you get to see the whole raw reasoning trace.
GPT-5.4 mini costs $0.016 and its summarized.
And in case you are wondering both play incredibly stupidly.
Kimi:
GPT 5.4 mini:The company does need to integrate the new AI-human-machine interface into its application development SDKs.
Unfortunately the June pricing change for Copilot forced me personally as well as my entire department at work to switch to Claude Code. With copilot we were hitting a few dollars of extra spend over the included credits in April and May, then in June we started chewing through the monthly budget every 2-3 days.
Just a completely insane price hike from the customer's perspective, I don't know what MS were thinking there.
Even if that is the price they need to be sustainable they should have waited until the competition changed their prices first. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot lost 50% or more of their customer base last month.
Eventually this could be where all the major players set their prices, so the thought occurs to me that nations should run some form of "public access AI", just like they did for TV. Use the free open models and use tax money to finance a few datacenters. Geo-lock the use and set strict throttles to manage load, but let school children and citizens use that AI freely otherwise.
If Copilot's pricing is the level for all AI in a few years, only the unicorn companies can afford to use them, and everybody else has no chance of competing with a company that can use AI.
I've set up a small rig, mostly settled on Qwen3.6 and I'm slowly adding features myself. It probably can't compete with Claude. I don't even know, I've stopped checking. It's providing a ton of value to me as is, and it only keeps getting better. All it takes is to realize that it doesn't actually matter if the grass is (maybe even objectively) greener somewhere else. Feels so good to know that it won't change under my feet. I've got this amazing, highly extensible tool, and it's mine.
You really don’t need them. After a certain point, bigger models give diminishing returns. If you can get 80% of the productivity gain with a free local model, use the local model. It will still be way faster than doing everything by hand, but you also don’t have to pay for tokens to a cloud provider and the tools won’t be ripped away from you on a whim.
This is the new attitude enlightened people should adopt. Reject the arms race.
Just wanted to leave a note for folks who might not have the memory to run a big 32gb model - I just found out there are some pruned models that have really good performance and If I had a smaller machine I might try this pruned unsloth Q4 quant of GLM 4.7 flash that sits at 14gb: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/GLM-4.7-Flash-REAP-23B-A3B-GG...
I usually use LM Studio for this type of thing but unsloth has their own studio type app that might be even better suited for these quants.
I used GLM 4.7 flash as my main model for months and it was an incredibly tenacious model and very very fast - I think on restricted hardware, this could be a great choice.
It's like we're mostly treading mud at this point. New editions are released, a version number increases, but I have to wonder if all steps are forward or they're more just tuned differently with similar actual perf per dollar as when this year began.
Most in fact seem to be happening to me with small models. Like your Qwen. Or Gemma 4 31B which is kinda magic especially when considering multilingual abilities. So yes, in that sense I can see "development" probably as we refine data sets and training methods but I see it less on the big hulking beasts with daily limits (unless you turn it up to 11 like Fable).
Edit: As I posted this, I saw a "before and after" comparison for Fable and the reintroduced version is seeing a catastrophic drop in BridgeBench performance as they're still mucking with the model. Go figure... https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2072692225100612032
Copilot is used a safe liability layer for enterprises, not as an actual harness.
At $OURCORP we are only allowed to use models available in Copilot. No problem to use them in OpenCode.
We're sticking with Cursor for now, using Kimi as our daily driver (branded as "Composer").
ps opencode cli is quite nice too