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Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

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Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#71

Post by jonathanlydall »

g947o wrote: post #37

> Note: Initially submitted this to MSRC (VULN-172488), MSRC insisted bypassing billing is outside of MSRC scope and instructed me multiple times to file as a public bug report. Good job, Microsoft.

“Not my job” award winner.

We use a “Managed Azure DevOps Pool”. This allows you to use Azure VM types of your choosing for build agents, but they can also still use the exact same images as the regular managed build agents which works well for us since we have no desire to manage the OS of our agent (doing updates, etc), but we get to choose beefier hardware specs.

An annoying limitation though is that Microsoft’s images only work on “Gen 1” VMs, which limits available VM types.

Someone posted on one of Microsoft’s forums or GitHub repositories to please update the images to also work on Gen 2 VMs, I can’t remember for sure right now which forum, was probably the “Azure Managed DecOps Pools” forum.

Reply was “we can’t do anything about this, go post in forum for other team, issue closed”.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re all Microsoft Azure, why should people have to make another post, at the very least move the issue to the correct place, or even better, internally take it up with the other team since it’s severely crippling your own “product”.

Useless and lazy employees.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#72

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

wat10000 wrote: post #69
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing i liked about that whole exchange was that GPT was readily willing to concede that all the details and observations I included point to a service degradation and failure on Microsoft side. Reminds me of an interaction I was forced to have with a chatbot over the phone for “customer service”. It kept apologizing, saying “I’m sorry to hear that.” in response to my issues. The thing is, it wasn’t sorry…

Better than actual human customer agents who give an obviously scripted “I’m sorry about that” when you explain a problem. At least the computer isn’t being forced to lie to me. We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.

I knew someone would respond with this. HN is rampant with this sort of contrarian defeatism, and I just responded the other day to a nearly identical comment on a different topic, so:

No, it is not better. I have spent $AGE years of my life developing the ability to determine whether someone is authentically providing me sympathy, and when they are, I actually appreciate it. When they aren’t, I realize that that person is probably being mistreated by some corporate monstrosity or they’re having a shit day, and I provide them benefit of the doubt.

> At least the computer isn’t being forced to lie to me.

Isn’t it though?

> We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.

Yeah we need something. I joke about with my friends creating an AI concierge service that deals with these chatbots and alerts you when a human is finally somehow involved in the chain of communication. What a beautiful world where we’ll be burning absurd amounts of carbon in some sort of antisocial AI arms race to try to maximize shareholder profit.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#73

Post by wat10000 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #72
wat10000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than actual human customer agents who give an obviously scripted “I’m sorry about that” when you explain a problem. At least the computer isn’t being forced to lie to me. We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.

I knew someone would respond with this. HN is rampant with this sort of contrarian defeatism, and I just responded the other day to a nearly identical comment on a different topic, so: No, it is not better. I have spent $AGE years of my life developing the ability to determine whether someone is authentically providing me sympathy, and when they are, I actually appreciate it. When they aren’t, I realize that that per…

Lying means to make a statement that you believe to be untrue. LLMs don’t believe things, so they can’t lie.

I haven’t had the pleasure of one of these phone systems yet. I think I’d still be more irritated by a human fake apology because the company is abusing two people for that.

At any rate, I didn’t mean for it to be some sort of contest, more of a lament that modern customer service is a garbage fire in many ways and I dream of forcing the sociopaths who design these systems to suffer their own handiwork.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#74

Post by bondarchuk »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #72
wat10000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better than actual human customer agents who give an obviously scripted “I’m sorry about that” when you explain a problem. At least the computer isn’t being forced to lie to me. We need a law that forces management to be regularly exposed to their own customer service.

I knew someone would respond with this. HN is rampant with this sort of contrarian defeatism, and I just responded the other day to a nearly identical comment on a different topic, so: No, it is not better. I have spent $AGE years of my life developing the ability to determine whether someone is authentically providing me sympathy, and when they are, I actually appreciate it. When they aren’t, I realize that that per…

The world would not actually be improved by having 1000s of customer service reps genuinely authentically feel sorry. You're literally demanding real people to experience real negative emotions over some IT problem you have.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#75

Post by indigodaddy »

likium wrote: post #65
indigodaddy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 100 Opus requests a month? That's not a lot.

For $10 flat per request up to 128k tokens they’re losing money. 100 * 100k is 10m tokens. At current api pricing that’s $50 input tokens, not even accounting for output!

I mean aren't they losing money on everything even the API? This isn't going to end well with how expensive it all really is.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#76

Post by pluralmonad »

brushfoot wrote: post #23

Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models: - $10/month - Copilot CLI for Claude Code type CLI, VS Code for GUI - 300 requests (prompts) on Sonnet 4.5, 100 on Opus 4.6 (3x) - One prompt only ever consumes one request, regardless of tokens used - Agents auto plan tasks and create PRs - "New Agent" in VS Code runs agent locally - "New Cloud Agent" runs agent in the cloud ( https://github.com/…

I've had single prompt to Opus consume as many as 13 premium messages. The Copilot harness is so gimped so they can abstract tokens from messages. Every person that started with Copilot that I know that tried CC were amazed at the power difference. Stepping out of a golf cart and into .

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#77

Post by port11 »

indigodaddy wrote: post #75
likium wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $10 flat per request up to 128k tokens they’re losing money. 100 * 100k is 10m tokens. At current api pricing that’s $50 input tokens, not even accounting for output!

I mean aren't they losing money on everything even the API? This isn't going to end well with how expensive it all really is.

It might be a gym-type situation, where the average of all users just ends up being profitable. Of course it could be bait-and-switch to get people committed to their platform.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#78

Post by whynotmaybe »

indigodaddy wrote: post #75
likium wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $10 flat per request up to 128k tokens they’re losing money. 100 * 100k is 10m tokens. At current api pricing that’s $50 input tokens, not even accounting for output!

I mean aren't they losing money on everything even the API? This isn't going to end well with how expensive it all really is.

Having worked some time in huge businesses, I can assure that there are many corporate copilot subscribers that never use it, that's where they earn money.

In the past we had to buy an expensive license of some niche software, used by a small team, for a VP "in case he wanted to look".

Worse in many gov agencies, whenever they buy software, if it's relatively cheap, everyone gets it.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#79

Post by NiloCK »

indigodaddy wrote: post #57
brushfoot wrote: post #23

Even without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models: - $10/month - Copilot CLI for Claude Code type CLI, VS Code for GUI - 300 requests (prompts) on Sonnet 4.5, 100 on Opus 4.6 (3x) - One prompt only ever consumes one request, regardless of tokens used - Agents auto plan tasks and create PRs - "New Agent" in VS Code runs agent locally - "New Cloud Agent" runs agent in the cloud ( https://github.com/…

So 100 Opus requests a month? That's not a lot.

Cat's out of the bag now, and it seems they'll probably patch it, but:

Use other flows under standard billing to do iterative planning, spec building, and resource loading for a substantive change set. EG, something 5k+ loc, 10+ file.

Then throw that spec document as your single prompt to the copilot per-request-billed agent. Include in the prompt a caveat that We are being billed per user request. Try to go as far as possible given the prompt. If you encounter difficult underspecified decision points, as far as possible, implement multiple options and indicate in the completion document where selections must be made by the user. Implement specified test structures, and run against your implementation until full passing.

Most of my major chunks of code are written this way, and I never manage to use up the 100 available prompts.

Re: Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

#80

Post by piker »

paulddraper wrote: post #64
piker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. I see all these posts about tokens, and I'm like "who's paying by the token?"

Most LLM usage? There’s some exceptions eg Claude Max

yes, and VS code as mentioned above. That's kind of the joke.
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