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Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

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Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#221
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For months, Employees had the option to choose claude code or copilot. Now they dont. Underlying model choice still has no restrictions. Opus 4.6 is by far the most popular. there's still big $$$ bills going anthropic's way.

Curious if anyone around here stayed on 4.6 (having a choice to use 4.7)

i use 4.6 and i've configured advisor to be on 4.7, so, when something's more complex the advisor can help. at least that's how i do with claude code, not sure of the others have implemented the concept of advisors.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#222
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.

> There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious.

By buying a subscription and dealing with the limits, using claude code and paying per token seems like the fast lane to the poor house.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched back to 4.6 thinking, as most did, 4.7 introduced some jankinesss to it. I switched back soon enough to 4.7. I think I might've adapted myself to what and how 4.7 does things. 4.6 felt a step backward.

4.7 is better if your spec is clearer. 4.6 is better if you give it more freedom doing it's tasks. 4.6 felt it'll steer off often if you give detailed specs than 4.7 though, so perhaps that's it

Agreed. 4.7 is a smarter but weirder model. It will get confused in unexpected ways, but when it's not confused it will perform better than 4.6.

It's not a bad idea to skip it and wait until the next model release, but I personally will stick with 4.7.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#224
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly related (me not understanding) is why the Copilot in VS code is essentially just CLI interface. Why can't it use the IDE tools (search, LSP, ...). All it ever does is trying to execute grep.

Because it’s far far easier to make a text-generation machine generate text that has decades of how-to explanations on the Internet than to correctly work an internal editor API that changes often and isn’t as well-documented. Especially if you want effective results.

Claude Copilot does seem a bit more lost on the interface side than other models, but then again all of them are. Only the baseline tier seems to have been fine tuned to the platform.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could understand the appeal of using Claude Code inside VScode rather than Copilot. I feel like I'm missing something obvious.

I'm a little the opposite, what's the point of using an IDE with AI? I genuinely don't get it? These days I just use Claude Code Desktop or Claude Code in powershell. Standalone, not inside and IDE. Honestly, I'm using Desktop more and more as it gets more features. The IDE is for me. No AI in it at all. If I want to get Claude to do something specific to a file I just @ the file.

> what's the point

Tab completion.

Smart model can cut down time to write complex firewall yaml dramatically, relying both on the existing file and the ugly draft (eg comma delimited details of the rules I need) I put out. It makes it 5 minutes lead time and 20 presses of tab instead of writing a shell/python full of edge cases or just copying existing rules as a template and laborously editing them -- smart model knows what the specific firewall needs.

But I'm not a developer, so I use both - haiku via github for tab completion and CC for cli.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because in video games there is always a chance to win so you can optimize your strategy around that chance. If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. With agentic coding there is no such guaranteed chance - in a way it's worse than a slot machine that is guaranteed to pay out eventually. You could sp…

> If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. Sidenote but I hope everyone realizes that 100 is kind of arbitrary here and does not mean the total chance to to get something is 100%.

you don't have to do the math unless it's on the exam, lol.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> Smaller companies will have departments that distill larger models into something more specifically manageable and useful for them.

In order to do that they'd have to make a concrete business case to justify the headcount and compute costs. They'd be facing the same fundamental economic problems Anthropic, OpenAI, MSFT, etc are facing just at a department level instead of a megacorp level. I hope they try it, sunlight is the best disinfectant.

However, when the pressure is turned up and people have to actually show results--and, like, be accountable--instead of just buying a subscription and externalizing the accountability, I don't think we'll see so much enthusiasm about AI coding. Whether or not an engineer is actually more or less productive with AI (not merely whether they feel more productive) will begin to matter a lot more. I don't see how people continue using AI in this hypothetical small company under those adverse conditions.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#229
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For months, Employees had the option to choose claude code or copilot. Now they dont. Underlying model choice still has no restrictions. Opus 4.6 is by far the most popular. there's still big $$$ bills going anthropic's way.

Curious if anyone around here stayed on 4.6 (having a choice to use 4.7)

4.7 turned out to be a disaster in multilingual settings, so I sticked to 4.6 so far. 4.7 seemed to be optimized for (very specific slice of) coding at the expense of everything else.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re all being given belt-loaded machine guns and tossed on to Planet K. We used to pay for the salaries of soldiers, now we have an Ammo Budget.

A belt loaded spinwheel machine gun, where there are some chances the next bullet is a dummy round, or goes in the wrong direction. And everytime you reload a new soldier is in charge of the gun

You don't need that analogy as the normal use of a automatic gun in war is not to kill, it is to suppress - stop the enemy from moving. If you are hit by a gun in automatic mode it is your own stupid fault. When you want to kill someone you switch to one shot or maybe 3 round bursts.
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