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Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

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Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#261
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In general economy that is not the stock market is looking less and less great. Answer to this is to tighten the belt and that means losing employees. Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years.

> Especially as there has not been any new great revenue sources outside AI in recent years.

Nobody can make a profit with AI. Any clever idea can be cloned with AI, competition makes it unprofitable. No moat, no arbitrage opportunity. "During the gold rush, the only people making money were the men selling shovels."

We can definitely do amazing things with AI, and it makes us have superpowers, but so does everyone else. My competition also uses AI. I have to keep up with an AI powered competition now.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#262
post #165

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...

Most of us never had the option for work to pay for Claude Code -- some internal orgs did this. That being said I had a personal Claude Code subscription for a bit. Honestly I find GitHub Copilot CLI (and now also the new GitHub Copilot app) quite decent. I mostly use it with Opus 4.7, or rarely with GPT-5.5. The VSCode extension is ok, but CLI or app are the better experience IMO.

Do people bring their own then (considering work doesn’t pay for it)?

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#263

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...

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

Claude Code will write the whole thing for you. Whereas doesn’t Copilot require input along the way of coding? ie- it doesn’t do all the programming for you

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just committed the skill to my dotfiles repository. https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/tree/master/~/.clau... There are many "critics", one for each quality I want reviewed. Correctness, consistency, maintainability, security, testing... Everything I could think of, and I keep adding more. https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/tree/master/~/.clau... The scrutinize skill is the entry point. The Opus I'm tal…

I would love to see the codebase once you reach the zero issues point.

I would advise against it, depending on the project.

My lone lisp project gets the most love. I spend weeks reading, reviewing, restructuring and rewriting everything. It's the project where I'm concentrating all my efforts. Everything I push to master is absolutely my own work and I do want everyone to read it.

I had no trouble letting Claude take over maintenance of my static site generator and virtual machine orchestration scripts though. I wanted to care but... I didn't. I did glance over the finished product just to ensure it wasn't going to nuke my laptop the second it ran, but that's pretty much the extent of it.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of this sentiment over the previous six months from people on reddit. I have yet to experience this myself as a developer with over 20 years of experience.

Opus 4.7 has been a real downgrade for me. I’m back to mid 2025 when I had to catch all the completely intermediary goals/assumptions the model is creating for itself

it's sort of good at thinking, writing specs, etc.. Also debugging. But as a coder: I see no advantage to opus 4.6 and I preferred sonnet most times already over opus 4.6.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#266
The comments I see recommending selective use of cheaper models doesn't match the reality I experience working in the industry. I have the constant threat hanging over my head of being fired if I don't churn out code quickly enough. I'm not willing to gamble with my livelyhood by using a less effective model.

Saving money on tokens isn't something that's rewarded during performance reviews; particularly because it's difficult to quantify how much you saved versus hypothetically using a more expensive model.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#267
post #191
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no fucking training to mitigate a slot machine.

that analogy is so boring now with so many real world examples of actual LLM work. people still can't get over the unreasonable effectiveness of algorithms.

There have also been winners of a slot machine gamba, so the analogy quite holds. I would even argue that there are considerably more slot machine gamba winners than the real world examples of actual LLM work.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#268

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.

Claude Code will write the whole thing for you. Whereas doesn’t Copilot require input along the way of coding? ie- it doesn’t do all the programming for you

It can code the whole thing for you, copilot in vscode is simply better, people just never tried it.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games like Diablo are basically a whole bunch of slot machines, and there are strategies you can follow to optimize your run.

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…

You’re right, the arpg analogy isnt great, it’s too simplistic. I was trying to come up with something heavily stochastic where people are coming up with strategies to get the odds in their favor. Maybe closer to speculating on the real estate market? But even that feels too simplistic compared to LLMs. Even the definition of a win isn’t well defined.

Actually it’s really its own thing, I don’t think the slot machine analogy works too well, you also have fixed odds (and you know they aren’t in your favor), and a binary output

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Claude does good work but reviewing it all properly takes quite a bit of time. It got to the point I started having trouble maxing out my weekly allocation. Dealt with that by going all out and making an agentic parallel code review skill. Basically an infinite TODO list generator. Now I'm definitely getting 100% of the usage I paid for. It really burns tokens like nobody's business, and catches a lot of issues…

I really don't like how the payment plans work with the providers right now. I feel this pressure to use all my tokens for the week, often just "wasting" them. But also, I want to take advantaged of the subsidized tokens in Claude Code and Codex for as long as I can. There is this real danger that our thinking, and the things we make, become bloated without constraints. IMO software has gone to shit since both mobile…

It's the gacha of software development. We've got periodically resetting timers. Prompting is like booster packs: we have a finite number of dice rolls before the timer resets. We might even get a Legendary Ultra Rare pull whenever Claude happens to be feeling extra motivated. Before you even know what's happening, it's hijacked the brain's reward circuits to the point you're waking up at 3 AM because that's when the timer resets. Gotta saturate those timers with pulls and minmax everything in sight.

At least it's doing something productive instead of just sinking money into literal gambling simulators. Mercifully, unlike video games, automation is not "cheating".

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