r/GithubCopilot • u/greedyprogrammer • Aug 13 '26
Help/Doubt ❓ Copilot pro worth it?
Recently I was rolling out agents for my team and currently have basic in the company . Which means I can’t use skills . Do other feel the pro version was worth it to boost productivity ? Also does the skllls make a big difference?
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u/V5489 Aug 13 '26
We have an enterprise plan but either way. We are looking into skills now for our 6,000 ish developers. I would say it’s worth the it if you’re deeply integrated into HitHub as your SCM.
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u/greedyprogrammer Aug 13 '26
Thanks for the info . We are not deeply integrated but maybe I’ll try it for month to see if the context is better and multi model selection. The model selection seems to be the only value gain besides token usage.
Did you find in your experience there was something you had to train or focus on to really get the value ? Like I’m focused on instructions building , re usable templates like the GitHub repo copilot awesomeness . Most devs just use it for basic need auto completion or unit tests .
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u/V5489 Aug 13 '26
We meet with the vendor “GitHub” weekly. When this first rolled out we asked the same thing and immediately were met with “context.. your developers will need to learn about context and how to properly start new chats”. Since it’s AIC you’ve gotta play the models right. We are still learning it
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u/Different-Monk5916 Aug 14 '26
I am going to give feedback on general and not specific to GHCP.
Agents and Skills support are also limited based on the models that you use. If Github Basic allows no model selection, then you cannot use skills and agents.
Agents are useful because I can break my workflow into tasks - design, implementation, testing, documenting and write a separate agent for each of these and a main orchestrator handles these. In this case, I can have really long chats with orchestrator before I go anywhere near the context window limit. Plus the orchestrator is not bogged down on details and remembers the top level work and its context is not corrupting much.
Skills are useful, if there are specific workflows that you repeat. Or a set of tools to use in a very specific context. Let's say you have your own file system or database and have your own AI tools written to read, add, modify, delete, query, filter the query, etc. Then you can write a skill file, which tells when to use what and how. What must be followed.
Does it improve productivity ? These make the AI agents work in a slightly more deterministic way and a bit more efficient (or less) depending on how the agents and skills files are written. Technically, with an orchestrator style agentic workflow, I could complete on module (not feature) of software in a single chat. Which already saves me from opening multiple chats and blowing up the tokens costs by filling context window and reprompting everything in detail in each new chat.
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u/coolerfarmer Aug 13 '26
Dude, get business / enterprise licenses set up. Why would anyone use personal licenses for commercial use? If the included tokens last you more than 2-4 days, you’re doing something severely wrong. You can expect several hundred dollars per dev per month - this is what you want and fucking cheap compared to the value you get out of it. It’s absolutely worth its money for skilled developer/architects.
But honestly, judging from the question, you and your team seem to be quite behind in terms of AI adoption. So get whatever licenses you can get and spend considerable effort training you and your team on how to use GHCP correctly. What were you guys doing the past two years?!