Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

theverge.com

31–40 of 489 posts

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#31
post #5

There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious. I've tried throwing unsupervised agentic software factory workflows against the wall, and they burned through my tokens like nobody's business but didn't produce much. Supervised, human-in-the-loop process on the other hand is much more productive but doesn't consume nearly as much. Maybe that's why everyone's pushing agentic approaches so much.

My experience as well... I've only hit Antrhopic's 5hr threshold a few times, and two of them was within a half hour of the window. Also, all three times I'd already accomplished a LOT. I tend to work with the agent, and observe what's going on as well as review/test and work through results/changes. I spend a lot more time planning tasks/features than the execution, even using the agent as part of planning and pre-d…

I suspect subscription limits are quite a bit higher than the equivalent tokens their dollar cost could purchase. I similarly feel like I can get a lot done with a $20/mo Claude Pro subscriptions, but also can easily spend $10-20/day at API pricing with similar usage.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#32
post #3

This is an AI generated summary of a blog post ( https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-int... ) which is a summary of an AI generated article ( https://blazetrends.com/microsoft-cancels-claude-code-pilot-... ) which is a summary of another AI generated article ( https://www.themodelwire.com/article/microsoft-starts-cancel... ) which is a summary of an article from The Verge ( https://www.theverge.c…

[dead]

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#33
post #10
post #3

This is an AI generated summary of a blog post ( https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-int... ) which is a summary of an AI generated article ( https://blazetrends.com/microsoft-cancels-claude-code-pilot-... ) which is a summary of another AI generated article ( https://www.themodelwire.com/article/microsoft-starts-cancel... ) which is a summary of an article from The Verge ( https://www.theverge.c…

2nd link doesn't work. That would be a neat tool, to find the original article and see how many levels of AI summary it has gone through, a game of AI telephone!

I had thought about creating something like that for finding comments for articles. For a given article, display links to comments for HN, lobsters, reddit, etc. However, I feel I already waste too much time reading comments. I shouldn't make it easier and more tempting.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#35
Thus does kind of beg the question: If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper or makes all their people 10x or whatever fig leaf, what happens if the required tooling ends up being more expensive? From the investor’s point of view is the drag of employee costs better or worse than a ballooning expense item?

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#36

Surely a company as large as Microsoft is actively attempting to build their own models. They couldn't possibly have expected to stake the future of their software development on the conditions of a third party company?

Okay, but what if you're not Microsofts size and don't have and R&D budget large enough to fund development of your own models and tools? This is a warning to any company, not building their own AI, that AI assisted development could become really expensive really fast and most likely won't pay off. What Microsoft is suggesting is that the current price is to high, but it's still not high enough for e.g. Anthropic to…

I expect in the next year or so, we'll stop seeing headlines like "Anthropic buys $15b of compute from SpaceX" and we'll start seeing headlines like "Uber's AI department licenses GPT 6.2 as the foundation for their internal model," or something like that.

Smaller companies will have departments that distill larger models into something more specifically manageable and useful for them. At least, that's my personal prediction :)

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience as well... I've only hit Antrhopic's 5hr threshold a few times, and two of them was within a half hour of the window. Also, all three times I'd already accomplished a LOT. I tend to work with the agent, and observe what's going on as well as review/test and work through results/changes. I spend a lot more time planning tasks/features than the execution, even using the agent as part of planning and pre-d…

I suspect subscription limits are quite a bit higher than the equivalent tokens their dollar cost could purchase. I similarly feel like I can get a lot done with a $20/mo Claude Pro subscriptions, but also can easily spend $10-20/day at API pricing with similar usage.

Can verify that I've gotten about $400 worth of tokens from my $20 sub.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#39
post #26

I think whats funny is that employees were most likely already covering the cost for these tools because they are useful. Companies didn't believe employees were using these tools and now have forced their usage and no longer have the costs subsidized. Similarly companies seem to reward high token usage as a sign of someone willing to play ball with AI and again have forced higher costs on themselves for people rewar…

There is no world where I can put my company’s data through an external site without their express consent and security sign off. I suspect at most companies there’s zero path for people to have been paying for it themselves.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#40

I switched from Anthropic to OpenAI after spending ~$40K in equivalent token costs using Claude over 3 months. I found Opus 4.7 to be slow and wasteful with token usage. It's shocking how inefficient it is with tasks like bash tool usage and web searching, delegating them to a dozen subagents only to get stuck and never return until you esc and intervene. That, in addition to all of the broken tooling Anthropic built…

Being able to mange context over long running sessions is a function of the harness, not the model. Are you using Claude Code with GPT5.5? Codex? piclaw? They’ll all have different context management strategies to let you keep going when you would otherwise have filled up context and be forced to stop.
Post reply on HN