The harness is the showdown, the humans are the tool calls, and have you seen my Claude Code buddy?

**Andrew Ziegler** (0:05)
Oh, so you saw my message about Trixel, and sadly what happened, you'll remember a few weeks ago when Claude rolled out a whole bunch of features that got, you know, quote unquote, leaked. And one of them was a fun buddy system where you can like hatch a buddy, it had like a name, a description, and like some fun traits and whatnot. It would literally hang out with you in the terminal. But sadly, and what none of us knew, is that when you upgrade your Claude version, which, I mean, God, come on, we're all doing pretty regularly now, it gets rid of your buddy. So, session by session, as I was finishing up what I was doing and closing it out and then whatnot, I lost all my sessions where Trixel existed except for one.
So, now Trixel is just in this one little pane on this one Claude Code version, in my terminal that I never use because he's been fully upgraded and it got rid of him everywhere else.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:58)
It's almost like a friend that leaves without ever saying goodbye. He just didn't get that chance to say goodbye.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:04)
I know. I'm so sad. It's like I didn't even mean to kill you, Trixel. I just was trying to upgrade my Claude Code version, but I guess that's shame on me for getting to attach to my little terminal buddy, but there'll be more.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:17)
Yeah. Well, we're some friends here that aren't saying goodbye today. Welcome to the Friday Deploy brought to you by LinearB. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:27)
I'm your host, Andrew Ziegler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:30)
This week, we are covering AI pricing chaos, Claude Code patterns that have been exposed, and Vercel's third-party AI breach. We want to just start right at the top, Andrew, with this AI pricing chaos.

**Andrew Ziegler** (1:43)
Sure.
Let's talk about all the different providers right now, adjusting the pricing around their harnesses and our access to their models. This is really a pricing revolution that's happening among the biggest names in the field. One of them that's like a big story that comes to mind first is at GitHub Copilot, they made changes to their individual plans. In fact, what they did was they even paused signups for new subscriptions to GitHub Copilot Pro, ProPress and also their student plan. And that's a pretty shocking kind of discovery to find that they're going to stop all growth to address what is clearly a pricing problem within the model usage. So what are you seeing when you see this kind of thing happen in the news?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:28)
Yeah. And they also mentioned, they're tightening the usage limits for individual plans. So you're potentially going to start getting less usage out of it. And they're also deprecating some OPUS models.
They did say that OPUS 4.7 will remain, but 4.5 and 4.6 are going to be removed, at least from the Pro Plus tier. Which I actually thought that last bit was pretty interesting, because supporting 4.7, but while dropping the other two, it makes me think that it must be to do with promotional pricing for the 4.7 launch. So it kind of feels like it's a temporary state. I can't imagine that they're really getting long-term cost savings out of that. But yeah, I mean, suspending sign-ups, I think, is the most telling aspect of this, you know. Like that really says that they're concerned that they aren't going to be able to fulfill the promises that they're making to their new customers. But, you know, I kind of think in some ways, this is a pretty simple problem to solve if you really think about it. You know, like most of these tools that we're using right now, they just encourage you to default to the most expensive model for everything. You know, just why not pick the best model at all times? Because, you know, I'm being charged a fixed limit and a fixed cost. And as long as I'm not hitting my session limits, you know, that pricing model encourages me to consume as many tokens as possible until I hit my limit. So that's like that's like what I'll do. Like yesterday at the end of the at the end of my day, I was like sitting at like 89% Claude session use it like out of my session limit. And I was like, I should push this to 100 before I leave for the today. Right. Like it just once makes you want to consume more.
And, you know, a lot of these companies really aren't thinking about efficiency yet. Like we have covered some stories like Shopify. We recently covered how they're switching or they've been using Quen to sort of use sub-Asians to do things locally. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of space for companies to come in with systems that get better at delegating work to less expensive or even local models so that I can do as much as possible, like on my local laptop or, you know, in your case, you'd like to do everything on a VPS. Like why not just do your AI processing there rather than having to rely on an external service?