I don't think the banner is painful, it just needs to be balanced by other graphical elements. It can offset by liberal use of <blink> throughout the text, or by a few tasteful gifs.

Yeah, totally. The recent pricing changes have just made my Copilot subscription go from great deal to awful value over night.

I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.

Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.

But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement

>but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper

Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code? Otherwise to pay 5.5% on all your tokens just so it's slightly easier to swap providers (ie. changing a few urls?)

> Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code?

Yep, you can plug deepseek/kimi/minimax into claude code just fine. Or run everything through another harness like opencode instead.

Or you could use gcp Vertex or aws Bedrock and still have access to a bunch of FMs without a markup.

Wow thats a lot for routing traffic.

And handling API tokens, and billing, and reliability, and middleware. I am not affiliated with them but it’s not “just” routing.

Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.

> handling API tokens

Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.

> billing

Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.

> reliability

They increase reliability?

> middleware

Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.

> Apple still charges 30%.

3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.

My point was that it centralizes this to one place instead of 10 for engineers, not that you wouldn’t have to deal with these things at all.

A single point of access with a single key for all of these things is a worthwhile convenience.

> They increase reliability?

For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.

There's nothing trivial about getting a Google API key. Openrouter removes that stress from my life. And I can route requests to providers above a certain TPS threshold. And much more.

Payment processing likely eats up at least 2-3% of that

IIRC OpenRouter charges you for the payment processing fee also.

Still worth it IMO to be able to switch from Provider A to Provider B if Provider A is having a bad day.

I will not be renewing/switching over, either.

I had copilot mainly so I could write issues and throw agents at it, while I went off and did other things. Has been great for contained spot work.

At this point, I'll go ahead and leave it expire, and then consolidate between Codex and JetBrains AI. Especially since Xcode supports Codex with a first-party integration.

Opus just got killed in Copilot. I always found it great, FWIW.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/changes-to-gi...

The reasons are very clear: Bibi owns Trump, Israel will unlikely have a US president as supportive again, they want as many facts on the ground as they can get whilst they have him.

Great. I, a small consultancy, have just spent the last month working out a workload that uses Opus 4.6 via VS Code to prep horrible, inconsistent, survey data for upload to a proprietary platform. Worked a treat with some light babysitting.

It's the sort of messy job that agents excel at. Decisions need to be made on free text data, translations done into multiple languages, ambiguity handled.

I now need to recheck it still works with another model, which involves a lot of manual verification; and potentially move to Claude Code and pay more money I can ill afford right now.

I'm not even clear from the post when this comes in, I'm guessing effective immediately.

This really hammers home for me the point that we should not be renting our tools.

My own dumb fault for trusting them, I will make sure to learn from this.

Old employers have always been the mainstay of my consulting work, former colleagues my main leads.

I can really recommend Breath: the New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. One of those rare books that had a noticeable, positive impact on my life.

I also recommend that one. It made me always try to keep my mouth closed when i'm not eating or talking. Not sure though if it had impact on my health, but that of course might depend on where you come from.

Other Books following the direction: https://whatto.space/self-help/nestor_james_breath/

There are so many ways to make money.

One doesn't need to compromise on one's values to earn.

Much love and respect. I quit a job over a similar matter of principle. The decision to walk was easy, but the following year wasn't.

I'm glad I did it though. We have to few years on this earth to spend our energies hurting others.

> We have to few years on this earth to spend our energies hurting others.

Don't you live in a nation state that uses violence to maintain the order that you've come to enjoy? Here's a harsh dose of reality for ya, suffering is unavoidable... the trick is convincing the worker class that it's easier to just cooperate

I've lived in a lot of places, many of them on the receiving end.

I'm from a western country originally though, sure. Can't think of any wars we've been in during my lifetime that have done me much good. All wars of choice and aggression.

all suffering is equal in amount and necessity

therefore it makes no sense to consider one's own role in producing, mitigating, or directing suffering in the world

i am very smart

/s

Unfortunately, no one is an outside observer when it comes to America.