Both Things Can Be True
What a weekend of actual use taught me
I understood the GitHub Copilot pricing email the moment I read it. I had been expecting it.
The old model no longer made sense. The assumptions it was built on had already left the building.
That didn’t stop me from feeling a little sad when it arrived.
I wasn’t confused by the change. I didn’t need a justification tour. The old pricing model depended on a version of the technology that simply isn’t what we’re using anymore. The shift makes sense.
Still, over the weekend, I had the feeling that I’d been using GitHub Copilot a lot.
So, I stopped guessing and looked.
What I actually did with it was fairly ordinary, at least by my standards. I used Copilot to analyze two years of data coming from four different sources and produce a summary I trust. It took a few hours. I could have done the work myself, but it would have taken days to normalize everything and tag it in a way that let me see patterns instead of noise.
I also set up a new GitHub organization and built out a six‑week project plan. I don’t love putting things on boards, but I love when they are on the board. We even do a low‑tech version of this at home. Weekend tasks go on the china cupboard. A big clean goes on the living room windows. I like knowing what the work is and seeing it broken down into steps that feel achievable. Copilot helped me do exactly that. The work didn’t just get listed. It got shaped.
While all of the items on my personal list were important, helping my daughter explore a move to Canada was the most meaningful. It meant documenting a straightforward familial path and tracking down records from a period when Nova Scotia didn’t issue birth certificates. Copilot wasn’t doing the work itself, but it helped point me to additional places to look and ways to fill the gaps.
I did a few other small things. Nothing dramatic. Just real work that mattered to me.
Afterward, I checked what that weekend would actually have cost under the new pricing model. I won’t linger on the number. What mattered more than the total was the realization that I had been wrong about how to reason about it. Looking was different from speculating. Measuring was different from assuming.
I could have done all of this without Copilot. I’ve done similar work many times before. But compressing days into hours, reducing setup friction, and getting from “I should do this” to “this is now on the board” has value for me. Even now. Especially now.
I’m still allowed to be sad about the change.
And I’m still going to pay for the tool.
Both things can be true.
Alison + Wiggins