The Hidden Costs of AI at Scale

GitHub replaced Copilot's flat-rate pricing with usage-based AI credits in June 2026, causing some users to face unexpectedly high bills due to heavy agentic workflows. This shift highlights hidden costs in AI usage, such as excessive context consumption and retries, which were previously obscured by flat-rate fees. Stanford's analysis found agentic tasks consume vastly more tokens than simple chats, with accuracy gains plateauing despite increased context, emphasizing the need for cost-aware AI