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Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

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Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#151

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rnxrx wrote: post #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?

> If developers are being laid off because AI is better/faster/cheaper

This is, in my opinion, tripe. SWEs are being laid off because of post-Covid over-hiring. The only evidence for labour destruction is in junior hires. But not because anyone is being fired, but because entry-level jobs are being cannibalised.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#153

Post by s_dev »

relevant_stats wrote: post #102

So, snippet from the article says the following: > I understand that Microsoft is planning to remove most of its Claude Code licenses and push many of its developers to use Copilot CLI instead. While Claude Code has been a popular addition, it has also undermined Microsoft’s new GitHub Copilot CLI coding tool — a command line version of GitHub Copilot that runs outside of development apps like Visual Studio Code. And…

So "Microsoft chooses to eat its own dogfood" is a more accurate title?

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#154

Post by user34283 »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #58
rnxrx wrote: post #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?

I suppose if it all works out it'll end up way more expensive than the employees the models displaced ever were. These kinds of technologies usually end up as an oligopoly at best, and those players will have a wide moat by then, and the things these models build will be tweaked such that no other model or human being can realistically work on them anymore, and then they can price gouge everyone to the brink of unpro…

There's 10-15 labs near the frontier, and like 30 serious inference providers, over 70 total on OpenRouter.

With research and hardware near guaranteed to bring the efficiency way up, I'm not scared here of massive price hikes.

There is no moat.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#156

Post by kaoD »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #103
KronisLV wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious. Colleague used Sonnet 4.6 on some pretty normal agentic coding tasks through AWS Bedrock to keep the data in the EU, 100 EUR usage in a single day. In comparison, the Mistral subscription costs about 20 EUR per month and we tested that for similar tasks it was okay , the usage got to around 10% of that monthly limit in a single day. Or Anthropic's…

I was trying to get a better sense of the time cost quality matrix of these, so I threw together a quick eval of Sonnet 4.6, Mistral's dev model, and Opus 4.7 (figuring it's what you'd use if you were on Max). The results for a function implementation and test of levenshtein distance in js are pretty similar but Mistral is 30x cheaper than Opus 4.7 and 4x faster than Sonnet 4.6. https://5m6qnuhyde.evvl.io/

But that's not very informative.

Levenshtein distance is not only a well-understood problem, it's small, self-contained, and extremely well-represented in the training data. The kind of problem where even small/bad models can excel. The golden standard for those tasks is just "use a library" so no wonder the beefy models are expensive: you're chartering a commercial airplane to go grocery shopping.

My personal benchmarks are software engineering tasks (ideally spanning multiple packages in a monorepo) composed of many small decisions that, compounded, make or break the implementation and long-term maintainability.

There's where even frontier models struggle, which makes comparisons meaningful.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#157

Post by iamflimflam1 »

From reading the article. They offered their developers both Claude code and Copilot.

What they wanted was for them to use both and feedback which was better.

The developers voted with their feet and didn’t use Copilot.

What Microsoft were hoping was that the opposite would happen...

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#158

Post by hannofcart »

gmerc wrote: post #138
beardyw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know that one. Loosely said to be Oscar Wilde.

Delivered in the voice of Lenard Lemoy to millions of GenX during their formative years.

Is that a civ 4 reference? You sir, have my upvote.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#160

Post by jstummbillig »

tra3 wrote: 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.

I think it's great. People at a broad scale are getting first hand experience with resource management. It's a fairly cheap way of doing it too (in contrast to: learning this by managing humans) and we can all benefit from the skill transfer.
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