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Comment by Argonaut998 | Hacker News Reader

I swear the industry is being Garry Tanned.

Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review.

We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing. Or is it best to stick within the allocated amount. Who knows? Management are playing games everywhere it seems.

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It's just not with AI though. It's who they get their advise from. One of my friend was cribbing to me about his company management - apparently someone in management discovered that PostgresDB is a real good database and free, and so they authorised the IT department to migrate their application from Oracle Cloud to PostgresDB as it will "save a lot of money" (true, but...). However, they aren't willing to shell out for the commercial solutions (like EnterpriseDB, which would be still a lot cheaper than Oracle), and are insisting that the team also recreate "all and every" feature that Oracle DB has and is used by their application, but is lacking in PostgresDB - after all, "If Oracle can do it, why can't you!?".

Wow... How (in)competent is his management??? "If Oracle can do it"... in 25 years with 1k devs...

47 years if you count from the first release. But now you have this super intelligent thing that enables anyone to create a billion dollar business - you have no excuse!

"Hey Opus, create me an fully tested code base for Oracle-like DB from scratch. Don't overcomplicate it, so it should be ready with when I get back from lunch"?

You forgot "make no mistakes"

I had a similar experience but with MSSQL, was invited to join some meetings with MS Sales folks. I quickly learned the project was never meant to succeed, but was simply leverage to negotiate a better contract.

Memories of me and my three developer team being told "we need to use Excel, but in a web browser. So just make an app that does everything like Excel"

Requests are such a weird metric. We have a token limit via Copilot (unless I'm misunderstanding our setup), and most of my "features" burn 1 to 2% of my token limit per month on 4.7. But I don't admin our plan, and I'm unsure what we actually git. Vscode just gives me a percentage of tokens remaining metric.

One of the weirder things about all this is how arbitrary and non objective the billing structure seems. One of the reasons I'm happy to use it at work, but won't ever personally subscribe. It's so opaque.

Copilot is currently based on requests (1 prompt = 1 request, with multipliers for different models). At the beginning of June the billing structure will change to just be normal API cost. Your features are going to start burning 10-20% of your token limit using 4.7

At my employer, everybody who has an opinion that matters is convinced that all of the overages by the high users will be more than made up for by the people who barely use it.

Maybe they’re right. But it’s really hard to see how.

We've raised, trained, hired and promoted generations of business people who push utter nonsense, understand nothing but optimizing for bad metrics, and orient solely around short term results. It's hard to look beyond modern corporate America when looking for causes of the fall in our living standards. This AI tokenmaxxing nonsense is just another rung on the same ladder to hell we've been on for decades.

How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.

If you are using subagents for asynchronous work, you can burn through 300 requests in a workday easily.

Copilot didn't charge for subagents. You could do an insane amount of work with dozens of subagents with a single request and a deep enough prompt to kick it off.

I setup entire virtual teams (Dev, QA, product, reviewers etc with the initiating model just acting as the agent manager to keep it's context minimal) to one-shot some stuff and it kept churning and making progress.

Those days are just about over with the change to token pricing but for a time....

300 prompts in a day isn't that unreasonable to achieve on a heavy day? And Opus has a significant multiplier as well

Yeah, thats 20 Opus 4.7 prompts.

That is a lot of prompts. What kind of prompts do you usually give?

Mine are usually giving specification and telling Claude to implement some part of it, referring to existing code base, writing unittests and running e2e until it passes. This can easily take 4-5 hours.

Then again, I have seen colleagues prompt “are you sure?” And other nonsense like that

I think we use it differently then, I tend to go heavy on the back and forth.

For speccing things out, I have a back-and-forth with the grill-me skill, break things down into tickets, as well as kicking off subagents. That said, I significantly overestimated the number of human messages I send.

My daily 90th percentile wrt number of prompts sent is sitting at 160 queries / day and average at 97 queries / day.

Ran an analysis of my last 2000 messages, with the following breakdown

Task delegation / execution: 23% Investigation / diagnosis / “what’s going on?”: 21% Planning / architecture / brainstorming: 15% Testing / verification / release ops: 10% Review / cleanup / quality control: 9% Course-correction / constraints / preferences: 8% Agent / ticket / workflow orchestration: 6% Providing context / evidence / pasted material: 4% Social reactions / acknowledgements / vibes: 2% Other: 2%

Yeah that’s not good for current Copilot usage since you are paying per request not by token

Yeah, copilot is only my backup - Codex and Claude are my primary, where it's per-token. Just looked up my user prompt count from my opencode db

I guess you need automation for that. Run claude with cron to find fulnerabilities, suggest and implement improvements, automatically dig through backlog

Hope people doing those kinds of automations are paid to waste prompts and tokens. Any cron based LLM run is just stupid waste

Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multiplier when it's used from Copilot. Falling back to 4.6 it's only 3.5x

It recently went up to 15x in our org.

Copilot charges a 27X multiplier on Opus 4.7 prompts.

Review-fix rounds after generation of text or code, until convergence to a solution that doesn't need more improvements.

You are prompting the same model to review what it just did?

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