2nd link doesn't work.
That would be a neat tool, to find the original article and see how many levels of AI summary it has gone through, a game of AI telephone!
There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious.
I've tried throwing unsupervised agentic software factory workflows against the wall, and they burned through my tokens like nobody's business but didn't produce much.
Supervised, human-in-the-loop process on the other hand is much more productive but doesn't consume nearly as much. Maybe that's why everyone's pushing agentic approaches so much.
At the enterprise level though, its going to be hard to want to use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training.
My experience as well... I've only hit Antrhopic's 5hr threshold a few times, and two of them was within a half hour of the window. Also, all three times I'd already accomplished a LOT.
I tend to work with the agent, and observe what's going on as well as review/test and work through results/changes. I spend a lot more time planning tasks/features than the execution, even using the agent as part of planning and pre-documentation. It works really well. I don't think people burning through the 5hr allotment in under an hour are actually reviewing/QC/QA the results of what they're doing in any meaningful way, and likely producing as much garbage as good (slop).
I'm really curious as to HOW the MS employees were using the agents as much as what they were doing.
The current thinking is automated agents is what turns this from an industry in the tens of billions to a multi trillion dollar one. So yes you are right on the money, agents stimulate demand for this thing they've built.
Microsoft poorly manages token use of most expensive models in a pilot. Then they use that failure to advertise/position their own Github Copilot agents to procurement teams, over the now widely validated Claude Code-based agents.
At least Codex is trying to win validation on merit.
Lots of these places are measuring token use from employees with managers having dashboards. It seems like performative code predicting rather than making anything useful.
My experience is, Claude Code burns way more tokens compared to other agents, probably to ensure high levels of perceived quality, which is, most of the times not worth the bloat for the user. The bloat works for Anthropic as an advertisement at the cost of your tokens.
The way coding agent work is fantastically wasteful. All the megabytes of code are processed over and over and over, sometimes withing just one session.
There are papers describing KV cache precomputation for commonly used documents (e.g. KVLink), but, of course, it's not a priority for model providers: they'd rather sell you more tokens, also they would rather get to AGI/ASI first than optimize usage of existing models...
Surely a company as large as Microsoft is actively attempting to build their own models. They couldn't possibly have expected to stake the future of their software development on the conditions of a third party company?
At one point there were rumours that they'd do that. They also have the rigts to oAI models for a few more years still, so they could always use that but apparently they're also compute starved (like anyone else).
This is an AI generated summary of a blog post (https://www.thelowdownblog.com/2026/05/microsoft-cancels-int...) which is a summary of an AI generated article (https://blazetrends.com/microsoft-cancels-claude-code-pilot-...) which is a summary of another AI generated article (https://www.themodelwire.com/article/microsoft-starts-cancel...) which is a summary of an article from The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/tech/930447/microsoft-claude-code-d...). I guess it would be better to link the Verge article instead.
Welp, this is the future we live in now
https://archive.is/WfCta
My bad. I had trouble finding the original source when I googled for it and grabbed a link. I was originally shown a screenshot of a x.com post.
The absolute state of the Hacker News main page in 2026. Thank you for taking your time to put it all together.
2nd link doesn't work. That would be a neat tool, to find the original article and see how many levels of AI summary it has gone through, a game of AI telephone!
The artificial centipede.
boy i'm leaving the internet. sun is shining. was a good time here while it lasted.
There's definitely a way to use Claude code that is token conscious.
I've tried throwing unsupervised agentic software factory workflows against the wall, and they burned through my tokens like nobody's business but didn't produce much.
Supervised, human-in-the-loop process on the other hand is much more productive but doesn't consume nearly as much. Maybe that's why everyone's pushing agentic approaches so much.
At the enterprise level though, its going to be hard to want to use a service in which costs are not predictable, and keeping those costs under control requires employee training.
My experience as well... I've only hit Antrhopic's 5hr threshold a few times, and two of them was within a half hour of the window. Also, all three times I'd already accomplished a LOT.
I tend to work with the agent, and observe what's going on as well as review/test and work through results/changes. I spend a lot more time planning tasks/features than the execution, even using the agent as part of planning and pre-documentation. It works really well. I don't think people burning through the 5hr allotment in under an hour are actually reviewing/QC/QA the results of what they're doing in any meaningful way, and likely producing as much garbage as good (slop).
I'm really curious as to HOW the MS employees were using the agents as much as what they were doing.
The current thinking is automated agents is what turns this from an industry in the tens of billions to a multi trillion dollar one. So yes you are right on the money, agents stimulate demand for this thing they've built.
Microsoft poorly manages token use of most expensive models in a pilot. Then they use that failure to advertise/position their own Github Copilot agents to procurement teams, over the now widely validated Claude Code-based agents.
At least Codex is trying to win validation on merit.
Lots of these places are measuring token use from employees with managers having dashboards. It seems like performative code predicting rather than making anything useful.
Speed without judgement always compounds badly.
My experience is, Claude Code burns way more tokens compared to other agents, probably to ensure high levels of perceived quality, which is, most of the times not worth the bloat for the user. The bloat works for Anthropic as an advertisement at the cost of your tokens.
The way coding agent work is fantastically wasteful. All the megabytes of code are processed over and over and over, sometimes withing just one session.
There are papers describing KV cache precomputation for commonly used documents (e.g. KVLink), but, of course, it's not a priority for model providers: they'd rather sell you more tokens, also they would rather get to AGI/ASI first than optimize usage of existing models...
Cancellation effective June 30. This was a _pilot_ launched in December that accidentally consumed their 2026 yearly target spend on AI!
I expect the r/LocalLLaMA guys to be going nuts about this news.
Surely a company as large as Microsoft is actively attempting to build their own models. They couldn't possibly have expected to stake the future of their software development on the conditions of a third party company?
Curb Your Enthusiasm theme starts playing.
> attempting to build their own models.
At one point there were rumours that they'd do that. They also have the rigts to oAI models for a few more years still, so they could always use that but apparently they're also compute starved (like anyone else).
I think tech companies are doing layoffs partly because they need to cover AI operating expenses.