GitHub Took Opus From Students. Now I’m Writing Code Manually.

Bijosilin Marisilin — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:09:08 +0000

A student’s story of watching the best AI tools disappear, one update at a time.

I am writing code manually now.

Not because I want to. Not because I think it builds character or makes me a better developer. Because GitHub took away every model that was actually useful, left me with $2.00 worth of credits that disappear after four messages, and somewhere along the way “free Copilot for students” became a joke.

Let me tell you exactly how we got here.

When it was good, it was really good
I am a final year software engineering student. I have been using GitHub Copilot through the Student Developer Pack for a while now.

And for a while, it genuinely felt like a superpower.

I could open VS Code, pick Claude Opus, and work through problems that would have taken me hours to untangle alone. Complex algorithms. Unfamiliar codebases. Architecture decisions I had never made before. Opus did not just give me answers — it explained the reasoning, walked me through the thinking, helped me actually understand what I was building.

That is what learning with good AI feels like. Not autocomplete. Not a shortcut. A thinking partner.

Twenty, twenty-five interactions a day. No limits. No credit bars slowly draining. Just me and the model, building things.

Chapter 1: They took Opus. Then Sonnet. Then left us Haiku.
On March 12, 2026, GitHub sent out an announcement.

New packaging for students. Copilot Student Plan. Nothing changes for you, your access continues, no action needed.

Except it did change. Buried in the middle of the post:

Claude Opus — removed from the student plan. Claude Sonnet — removed. GPT-5.4 — removed. GPT-5.3-Codex — removed.

What was left for students to pick?

Claude 4.5 Haiku.

Haiku is the cheapest, smallest, fastest model in the Claude family. Anthropic built it for quick, simple tasks where speed matters more than depth. It costs $1 per million input tokens. Opus costs $5. That price gap exists because the capability gap is real.

Haiku gives you something. But it is not Opus. Anyone who has used both for real work knows immediately.

GitHub said they made this change “to keep Copilot free and accessible for millions of students around the world.”

I get it. Running Opus for nearly two million students every day costs serious money. I am not saying GitHub is lying.

But when the Student Developer Pack marketed itself as giving students access to the same tools professionals use — and then the first major change was removing the best models and leaving the cheapest one — that promise quietly died. Most students just did not notice yet.

Chapter 2: Then came the limits
After the model cuts, weekly and session token caps appeared.

GitHub said most students would never hit them. Some of us did anyway — during exam week, hackathon nights, or any session where you were deep in a problem and firing question after question.

Mid-thought, Copilot would just stop. Rate limited. Come back tomorrow.

After that came the 300 monthly premium request cap. Every chat message counted. 300 sounds generous until you realize a serious work session can burn 20 to 30 in one sitting. You start checking the counter. You start wondering if this question is worth a request or if you should just figure it out yourself.

I caught myself doing that. Rationing questions. Deciding some things were not worth asking.

That is a strange feeling when the whole point of the tool is to help you learn.

Chapter 3: June 1st — The last straw
On June 1st, 2026, GitHub switched to GitHub AI Credits.
Students now get 200 credits per month.

That is $2.00. Total. For the whole month.

Every single token costs credits now. Your message in. The response out. The context the model holds in memory. All of it drawing down from your 200 credit pool. And when the credits run out, there is no fallback model anymore. Copilot just stops.

Students opened VS Code on June 1st and within minutes some of them had nothing left.

One student posted on the GitHub forums: their entire monthly allowance was gone after 4 to 5 chat messages. The same student had been making 20 to 25 requests every single day for months before this. On June 1st, a few messages. Gone.

I read that post and thought — yeah. That tracks completely.

The full picture
If you lay out the whole journey:

We started with Opus, Sonnet, and frontier models. Real tools. Real access.

Then Opus was removed. Then Sonnet. Haiku was left behind and called free access.

Then weekly token limits. Then a monthly request cap. Then the cap was replaced with $2.00 of credits that four chat messages can erase.

Each step was announced as a small necessary adjustment. Each one framed as protecting free access for students. Each one made the tool a little less useful than the month before.

And here I am at the end of that road.

Writing code manually.

What makes me actually angry
I want to be honest about this part.

It is not losing the tool that gets to me the most. Developers survived for decades without AI assistants. I can figure things out the slow way. That is fine.

What gets to me is the framing that never changed.

The Student Developer Pack still lists Copilot as a headline benefit. GitHub still says they are committed to supporting the next generation of developers. The marketing still sounds like the promise from two years ago.

But $2.00 a month that runs out in four messages is not free access. It is the ghost of free access. The name of a benefit without the benefit itself.

And the students who feel this the most are not the ones who can casually subscribe to Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus. Those students already had alternatives. The students who genuinely depended on the Student Pack were the ones for whom $20 a month for an AI subscription is not a small decision. Students from countries where that is real money. Students without a credit card. Students who saw this as their one realistic shot at the same tools everyone else gets to use.

Those students lost the most. And every announcement was wrapped in language about global access and supporting the next generation.

I am just a student
I do not have a fix for this. I am not going to pretend I do.

I am finishing my degree, building projects, trying to learn as much as I can before I graduate. I do not have an expense account or a company paying for my tools. I have a laptop, a GitHub account, and 200 credits that reset at the start of each month and disappear before I have done anything meaningful with them.

So I am writing code manually now.

Thinking through problems myself. Reading documentation the long way. Debugging line by line without a thinking partner to bounce ideas off.

Maybe that is fine. Maybe that is even good sometimes.

But I remember what it felt like to work with Opus. To actually have a tool that met you where you were and helped you think harder, not just type less.

That feeling is gone now.

And I just think someone should say that out loud.

If you are a student going through the same thing — drop a comment. I want to know I am not the only one sitting here writing for loops by hand in 2026.

DEV Community: Bijosilin Marisilin

GitHub Took Opus From Students. Now I’m Writing Code Manually.