Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

This is bad because it means Microsoft may try to make copilot worse to boost profit.

Like I can see them charge per completion, and charge too much so that it costs $100+/month to run for an average developer. Or crack down on unofficial "copilots" like https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el (although I really doubt more than 1% of completions go to these since they are niche tools; most people are using the official Copilot for VSCode)

It looks like there's a lot of competition though. I'll say right now, if Copilot gets worse and someone has a half-decent open-source alternative, I'll pay a substantial amount (possibly $50+/mo, which is a lot for a grad student), because AI code-completion is that useful

If the productivity boost is so high, what's a good price for it? $100/month might be more than now, but how many paid hours of dev time are saved by it? Asking as a non-user.

Its another saas product charging per seat per month, doesnt even begin to replace an actual competent developer, it’s glorified autocomplete. If it goes any higher than 20-30 bucks, I’ll have my company drop it.

20-30 bucks doesn't even begin to replace an actual competent developer's salary either, even in a super low wage country. Especially factoring in overhead.

In fact I imagine that in most places this would pay for 1 hour of their time. Which you pay per month for copilot.

So the question is not how many developers you save. But if you save more than one hour per month per developer.

I'd imagine that will be fairly easy to achieve.

The productivity boost depends on what you're doing on a day to day. It saves me around 15min per day as I'm currently coding full time.

For my previous job, it would save me 5min / week.

And it also saves me of using the keyboard so I guess it's also better for those with carpal tunnel syndrome.

A gradual pricing per request would totally work for me, cheap when I'm not using it, justified when I'm using it a lot.

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