given the recent changes that kneecapped the plan for students [1], i feel less bad after seeing this. always had monthly limit on premium requests shown in the extension (which i would watch in dread creep up), the daily/weekly "usage limits" part seem ambiguous at best.
using agentic workloads as the basis for this change does not sit quite right with me. if you look at the newly added debug mode, you may notice the token consumption as well as the subagent/tool calls made behind the scenes. my takeaways:
- it consumes way too much tokens for simple tasks (had one use case where the agent burnt 16+ million tokens just to make 50 line change in a monorepo using plan -> agent approach)
- even when you select a model in the dropdown, the subagents/tools can be called with an entirely different model, often the haiku-4.5. gpt-4o is widely used for creating summaries or titles to display for the plan.
- the new reasoning modes have exacerbated the token burning as the agent tends to loop a whole lot. the prompt vs plan token ratio is quite minuscule, and when combined with your own instruction files and skills, it just goes out of the window.
i think they have given a generous model in the past, but by kneecapping the lower tier, it no longer justifies existence. if they want to raise prices, they can raise the floor. or rather put some work in improving their own orchestration system before putting the blame on the users vibing it out.