The signal
GitHub reportedly had its “best month ever” in June because demand for AI coding kept growing after Copilot moved to usage-based billing. Business Insider also reported that increased usage has contributed to major outages in 2026 and capacity pressure.
GitHub’s own billing announcement explains the underlying shift: Copilot moved to AI Credits on June 1, and usage is calculated from token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens. GitHub also described Copilot as evolving into an agentic platform capable of long, multi-step coding sessions across repositories.
That matters for engineering.
A long, multi-step coding session is not a chat message.
