Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

theverge.com

301–310 of 489 posts

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#301

I’ve been quite content with CoPilot’s $10/mo plan. Still offers access to Claude models (limited tokens) but has no time limits like the $20 Claude plan, so no interruptions in work flow. I use one of the free models for the more pedestrian tasks then sic Claude on the particularly thorny problems. Works very well for me.

Copilot was the best deal in AI tooling for a few weeks there.

New pricing model changes that. I will still keep it around for autocompletion (for the rare times when I open up an editor).

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect AI would have to get drastically more expensive before it starts looking worse than payroll. If one developer using Claude Code can effectively substitute for 2 developers, you are already coming out ahead at current API pricing assuming very heavy usage, your cost is going to be ~1.5x developer (factoring in beyond salary - benefits, PTO, the other overhead that comes with having employees). So you're gett…

This is economy dependant. It’s really Indians why will take the brunt of AI job losses.

Interesting point. Outsource the outsourcers...

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#303
post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if Amazon will do the same with CC and Kiro now that we internally have access to both. I think Kiro might have some “first mover” advantage internally, but CC feels better to use.

I never understand why Amazon even bothers to build their own coding agent. GitHub Copilot is in a somewhat similar place as Microsoft's toy but still different -- it was more or less the first coding agent/assistant, and GitHub/VSCode/Microsoft has enough user base and impact to influence individual users and enterprises' choices. For Amazon's coding agent -- I just never see anyone outside Amazon even mentions Kiro…

Is there any proprietary Amazon end-dev/ops facing service that's worth using? I've never had a good experience with any I've tried - CodeBuild, Cloud9, Q, SageMaker, WorkMail, WorkDocs, Chime, OpsWorks,...

I love AWS at the infrastructure level, but their PaaS tends to be meh, and their end-user directed stuff is usually atrocious.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#304
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stay with 4.6 if you can, it is disabled (afaik) on vscode claude code extension. 4.7 IMO is around 10-20% worse at understanding your prompt intention. You need more effort to explain your intention clearer so it doesn't divert.

Same. 4.7 intelligence is significantly worse than 4.6 on ALL 3P Harnesses. So only on Claude Code and Anthropic API/Subscription you get decent performance but on every other Harness and/or Cloud Provider inference (Bedrock) it performs worse than 4.6 on almost every task. This is not just anecdotal, i've talked to many colleagues from AWS, Microsoft and so on and they all agree that something fishy is going on.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use copilot cli and I can pick Anthropic models. The Microsoft interface seems fine to me, and equivalent. Not sure what the big deal is.

Funny I had the opposite experience. The Claude models seemed equivalent to GPT-5.4/5 in a generic harness like Copilot CLI or Opencode or Pi, but Claude Code the app/harness is so much better than all the others that I switched at work, even though I'd much prefer to use a non-proprietary harness (and eventually I do want to get Pi set up to be comparable).

Well, maybe I shouldn't have assumed the harness wasn't a big deal. When Microsoft changes its pricing on 6/1 I'll try some of the others.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#306

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...

Microsoft have historically tended to dogfood their own products. Obviously you want to be aware of what else is on the market, and use the right tool for the job -- but equally if you have a directly competing product, you'd prefer your org's telemetry and suggestions are directed towards improving your own software rather than your competitors'.

This was always a little weird to be because Microsoft internally is actively hostile to cross-org collaboration. If you worked in most of Azure you basically have 0 lanes of communication with someone from the Windows team and vice versa. Triply so for stuff like Kusto or Teams which you'd be dogfooding daily. I guess if there's a horrible stop the world bug it'd get surfaced through telemetry but normal user feedback is not a thing.

Compared to working at other big techs, where I was able to direct msg the engineers on the team for internal protobuf or datalake services in addition to user groups that were generally responsive it was just strange. Also Microsoft doesn't have a monorepo so you can't just commit patches to their service because you don't have access to their repos which I pretty regularly do elsewhere.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#307
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have such toxic environment, run.

Where to, that's the question. The economy is in the gutters and the replace-people-with-AI craze is making the issue even worse.

Perhaps for now. But you know, after working solid with AI for two years and adopting effective methods using detailed plans, and having a lot of success with it, here is the problem:

Coding faster leads to less understanding and higher long-term risk. Source-Code amnesia is real, and there’s a time requirement to really understand and appreciate what a system is actually doing.

I’ve been able to implement very large features using frontier models, but the code needs to always be revisited.

AI can do two things: find vulnerabilities, and prototype code. It cannot design software, and any appearance of such is an illusion at best.

We don’t need to produce faster to be successful, we need to create better, long lasting products.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#308
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any corp (> 150 seats) has to use API pricing, so e.g. I don't have pressure or weekly limits, just a set budget I can use each month.

That will be true in March 2027, but isn’t necessarily true today. I work in a large organization that is grandfathered into the Enterprise Subscription plan until then. We have thousands of seats using Claude Code.

Re: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TIL. I know literally nothing about automatic guns

The only important thing to know is they're loud and thus impossible to conceal. Maybe someone out in the open would be hit if one starts firing unexpectedly. However, the vast majority of cases, the purpose of an automatic gun in war is just to put oatness stream of bullets so that everyone on the other side knows it's stupid to show your head and this allows your own people to move in relative safety because they know where your automatic weapon isn't going to be firing and the enemy, of course, isn't going to be able to respond.
Post reply on HN