HACKER Q&A
📣 bitbasher

Are You Paying for Github Copilot?


If so, have you found it an overall net positive for your productivity?


  👤 JojoFatsani Accepted Answer ✓
I just use an OpenAI API key with a wrapper (MacGPT). It’s much cheaper.

I’m hearing good things about the Cursor IDE plus Claude sonnet 3.5 though. $20 a month is nothing if it improves your productivity.


👤 anonzzzies
I pay for Cursor (with sonnet) and Copilot and I also use Aider with Sonnet. All are excellent productivity boosts.

👤 duckkg5
I am, and yes, it has been a productivity boon for me. Although I have discovered much more effective tools, like Claude Sonnet 3.5. Even though there is a lot of chatter lately in r/claudeai about Claude being 'lobotomized', I can't say I've seen the same thing. I'd originally relied on Copilot and ChatGPT, but went to Meta.AI and then Claude. Claude has consistently allowed me to create and manage actual useful projects, and it was better by a mile.

It's still tedious to keep Claude Projects up to date, but it seems to be able to generate some actually decent and usable code. Claude helped me build a fairly complex app (https://instantaiphone.com) and get it set up on a server - trying to piece something like this together with Copilot or ChatGPT was MUCH more challenging. I am not super surprised at the conspiracy theories about a new model coming out that would necessitate Anthropic 'lobotomizing' its current model but that take does seem kind of cynical. Copilot has some catching up to do, in my opinion. GitHub needs to release Workspaces soon https://githubnext.com/projects/copilot-workspace