GitHub Copilot went pay-per-token, and some bills jumped 25x

This is the flat-fee era of AI coding tools ending, and Copilot is the first big one to make you feel it. The story isn't 'Copilot got greedy' but it's that agentic coding always had a real, metered cost; it was just hidden inside someone else's subscription. Now you pay for every token your agent burns reading, planning and re-running. Two things change this week. First, be deliberate about which tasks you hand to an autonomous agent versus a cheap autocomplete. Second, start treating AI tool spend like a cloud bill: something to budget, meter and cap, not a fixed line item. The builders who come out ahead aren't the ones who use the most AI, they're the ones who know which task is actually worth the tokens.