What's going on?

[Thaval]

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TL;DR:
Do you have a better alternative to Github Copilot? Zed, Antigravity, etc? How about custom agent integrations?
I'm very unhappy with the progress of Github Copilot (and GPT) since summer. It got better and worse but since November it feels like just one way - down.

I have several issues with Github Copilot and I think this is the last week I'm using it. Already was looking around but for the luck of GitHub, the others do not support PayPal yet. But whatever, I'm willed to create a credit card. Why?

• Your pricing model is way too expensive and way too limiting
• Working in two VS Code instances gets me rate limited pretty fast (for 60 minutes). I pay 200€ per month privately. WTF?!
• VS Code copilot chat often doesnt update on long days. I send a message, the agent does the work in the background but the chat is not updated - i cannot see what was done and I cannot see the thinking process. Wasted request, full price though.
• The GPT versions are getting worse and worse, unreliably, hallucinating a lot again and the code quality seems to be getting worse. I also had the idea that Claude is just getting better but Claude Opus for example hasn't really changed. For complex tasks, it's actually the only choice! You can forget the GPT versions if you want a quick and good solution.
• I assume that you actively trottle Claude integrations so people are using the GPT versions. Examples: I use Claude Opus 4.5 to a bigger solution and then do some complex task on it. I get the error that the context of 200.000 has been exceeded, so the request cannot be handled. Then I try GPT 5 and it works. Switching back to Claude Opus 4.5 and it works again... I know GPT 5 has double as much capacity like Claude Opus 4.5 but it doesn't make sense that the CO works the second time (same request, same prompt, same context...). Then today, I get this (don't blame me for the prompt, I was annoyed and didn't even expect a good solution)

But instead I get an error message for.... something that I didn't even provide. So my guess you have a bug somewhere in the context handling. Causing us to lose money.

• Sometimes I get 500 http status code from the chat (so internal server error) and I see I'm being charged for that. Really? For your bugs I'm being charged? Retrying the prompt mostly works.
• Somehow Copilot manages it to make VS Code non-responding when I start a special project. It's only one project. If I start it manually within VSCode or the terminal, it just starts up.
• The list of all chats on the right is confusing. Sometimes I get a new entry there when sending a message in an existing chat. What is that for?
• The playwright MCP is not really working reliably, I can actually not really use it because it. It's opening a browser but that's it.
• and the list goes on ....

Long story short. I will look into Cursor, Windsurf, Zed and Antigravity. I will check the costs, the quality, the advantages and disadvantages over VS Code + Github Copilot and most of all how to integrate custom agents. I had hope for Mistral as it was planned to be open source, free... but guess what. All the AI creators are lusting for money like hyenas. Maybe it's time looking to the east, see what DeepSeek has to offer.

Edit: I just downloaded Antigravity while writing this post and tried out if it can complete my request from the screenshot. First request, bug fixed... I tried like 20 times with VSCode and Copilot.. GPT5, 5.2 Codex, without codex, with Opus 4.5, several times, even rephrasing the prompt and even adding screenshots showing what's going on. It could even verify the bug fix automated and with screenshots. Guess I found my winner.

[Akash1134]

Hi @Thaval,

Thanks for sharing the details here. I’m sorry to hear that Copilot hasn’t been working as expected for you in VS Code.

Some of what you’ve described may need a closer look at logs and diagnostics, which isn’t ideal to dig into on a public thread. Our Support team can help review those details and work through this with you more directly. You can reach them here: https://support.github.com/contact and open a ticket.

Thanks again for flagging this and taking the time to explain what you’re seeing.

— Akash