Developers who embraced GitHub Copilot as their daily coding companion woke up this week to a harsh new reality. The AI assistant’s switch to metered billing has triggered immediate backlash. Many now question whether the tool remains viable for their workflows. Effective June 1, GitHub replaced its previous request-based system with usage-based billing built on GitHub AI Credits. Each interaction now draws from a monthly allotment determined by tokens consumed across input, output and cached context. The shift aligns costs with actual compute demands of increasingly complex agentic tasks. But for individual subscribers it has produced bills that feel unpredictable and punishing. “This is a staggering shift from a ‘predictable subscription’ to a ‘stressful meter-based’ service that hinders my productivity rather than helping it,” one developer wrote on GitHub’s community forum.…