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Comment by doodpants | Hacker News Reader

I've often thought, "If AI is so great, how come all these tech companies are shoving AI features down our throats for free, instead of charging real money for them?" I'm actually glad that MS is doing this, and I hope it starts a trend of more companies gating their AI features behind paywalls, and a noticable reduction in the number of popups I encounter badgering me to use AI features that I never asked for.

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IntelliCode was first released in 2018, well before the current AI landscape where running each model costs a neighborhood's worth of power. Indeed, it runs using a small local model that costs essentially nothing in comparison to the rest of the machine running it.

In fact, the intent here is exactly the opposite of what you're hoping for (less AI badgering). They're trying to get people to actually use Copilot after recently missing internal adoption goals on all the AI products they're trying to shove down people's throats. The badgering is only going to get worse, and they're going to continue removing functioning, free features to do so. You should not be glad that Microsoft is killing a free lightweight product for a bloated, ecologically harmful and economically wasteful one.

I believe this comment is nuts. How the hell are you justifying the removal of a free and common IDE functionality for something that it's rate limited based on usage? In any other context, this would have been called enshittification...

And today, kids, we've learned the difference between free as in beer and free as in speech.

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