Copilot dropped the hundred dollar year. I still pay ten a month.

Carol needed the W-4 update form on Brubaker Tax Service's site fixed. I handed the form handler to Copilot, it wrote about forty lines of PHP in under a minute, and I nearly pasted it in. Looked right. Then a half hour later I'm testing it and the form uploads fine and the email to the office never goes anywhere. It had written to a mail address that hasn't existed on that site in two years. Confident. Fast. Wrong. That's the job in one paragraph.

So here's the thing about paying ten dollars a month for this. I'm not paying it to write my code. I'm paying it to write the boring parts so I can spend my attention on the parts that matter. Now, I'm no programmer. I learned at thirty-eight on a kitchen table. That's exactly why I check every line it writes, and that's exactly why the checking matters.

I also want to be clear about which Copilot this is. Not the one Microsoft bundles into Office and upsells with #7, the one that writes your emails. This is the one that lives in my code editor on the Mac mini and suggests PHP.

What the bill actually did

My Copilot Pro renewal was $100 for the year. In April, GitHub moved the whole thing to usage-based billing and stopped renewing annual plans. My year ran out, and my renewal is now $10 a month, $120. Their blog post says plan prices aren't changing, and they're right in the narrow sense. The price per month is the same. The commitment is gone, and the meter is different.

The billing works in credits. One credit is one cent. Your monthly plan includes an allowance, completions and inline suggestions don't touch it, and the meter runs on the fancier requests: heavier chat questions, model choices beyond the base, agent runs. Long story short, the year plan is dead. Everyone's on the month-to-month meter now, or on the free tier.

What I let it write and what I don't

1. Let it write: repetitive PHP. Same form handler, fifth site, different field names. It writes that in a minute and it's usually fine.
2. Let it write: boilerplate. CSS blocks, comment blocks, the repeated scaffolding around every plugin. No thinking in it.
3. Let it write: the first draft of a function I'm stuck starting. Then I rewrite it anyway, and the rewrite is the part I learn from.
4. Don't let it write: payment logic on Carol's site. Anything that touches a customer's money or a client's data gets written by hand, slow, checked twice.
5. Don't let it write: anything I can't read out loud and explain to Dr. Ostermann's office manager. If I can't explain it, I can't fix it at 9pm, and 9pm is when these things break.

The W-4 email bug is the pattern. It writes to what the average site would look like, not to what Carol's site looks like. It doesn't know her hosting blocks the usual mail path. I do, because I spent a day on that in the migration.

The gauge set

An uncalibrated gauge set gives you fast readings all day. Every one of them is close enough to be dangerous. The fix isn't a better gauge. It's checking the reading against something you know is true. Copilot is the fast gauge. Carol's staging site is the known true one.

If you want to try it

Start with Copilot Free. No card, and it covers 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests a month. That's most of what I actually use. If you hit the wall, then $10 a month is a fair price for the paid tier, and it comes out of job money like everything else on this site.

What to do Monday: open your editor, install Copilot Free, and let it finish one boring function. Then read every line it wrote before you save. That's it. That's the whole trick.