For the first months of this year I built genshin.dungeon.studio with GitHub Copilot. I used its chat far more than its autocomplete. I’d tuned it into my own tool: standing instructions, a library of prompts for the jobs I ran most often, and conventions for how it wrote code, commits, and reviews. I asked, it answered, and the work moved fast. Some months ran to the better part of a hundred commits, and that one project took most of them. The chat sat in a panel next to the code, in the editor, on my desk.
Then, in April, GitHub changed its individual Copilot plans, and the Claude models were no longer part of what the top tier included. But Claude was the only model I ever reached for. Copilot’s value was the spread of models it offered, and I only wanted one of them. Once that one dropped out of the plan, there was no reason left to go through it. I could get Claude straight from Anthropic.
That same week I was at GrafanaCON in Barcelona, and I tried the Claude subscription. It came at one flat price a month. I expected a cheaper version of what I had, and little more.
Then I flew home. On the plane, over the wifi, I opened the chats on my phone and planned projects. I wasn’t writing code, only thinking through what to build and how. I had never done that away from my desk. Copilot had lived in the editor, so my work had lived there too.
It took a few minutes to see that I hadn’t bought a cheaper Copilot. I’d bought a different way to work. From a seat on a plane I could hand Claude Code a task and drive it by remote, with nothing in front of me but a phone. The work had left the desk.
What changed after that wasn’t how much I got done. It was how many things I could keep moving at once. Under Copilot, one project had taken most of what I had. Now the work spread out. Projects I’d left for dead started moving again. This blog was one of them, quiet since 2020 and now taking over a hundred commits in a month.
The cost of the change was real, but it wasn’t money. It was the tooling. I rebuilt the way I worked around Claude: the instructions, the skills, the small configurations. I’ve written before about shaping a generic tool until it fits your hand; this time the tool helped shape itself. Claude built most of that scaffolding with me, and each piece made the next thing quicker to start. You can watch it go up in the history, a few days after I got home.
The talk now is all about the cost: what these tools run, who can afford to keep them going, where the spending stops. I watch what I spend, but money was never my limit. My limit is how much I can hold at once. In the time I used to spend in a queue or on a train, I can set a new project going. I don’t lose track of them; I come back, look, and pull each one along. That keeps me at the edge of what I can carry, and never quite past it.
The edge is where I live now. I meant for the work to take less out of me; instead it grew to fill whatever I could give it.