I could make it work with the default/base model (GPT 4.1) and it’s pretty decent. It’s even better with Claude 4 Sonnet but that will use up your credits and the $10 plan gives you (I think) 350 questions a month with these so-called premium models, while with the base you have literally unlimited queries, which is something you don’t really see much with these coding agents (believe me, I’ve looked!).
So I’d say the base model is at around 80-90% of the premium, and it’s free. Most of the time it works just as well. It’s most obvious when you push it or start piling up the code and it gets messy. I initially built a feature in a web app with the base (GPT) which took around 2000 lines total, and after realizing that there was a lot of repeated code and such, I asked the premium (Sonnet) to analyze the code and tell me how it would refactor it… And it did. In one go. Cut it down to 1000 lines. And it actually worked! I know luck factored into it, but that right there proved why Sonnet is superior to GPT. And I used both through Github Copilot.
Basically what I’m saying is that Github Copilot is essentially Cursor if you use the Sonnet model. But the problem is that you can’t get as many Sonnet queries with Github as you get with the Cursor $20 plan (which is around 2000 questions a month). In my case, since my company pays for both, I switched to Cursor. For free Claude access with an obscenely high daily token limit, I recommend Rovo Dev from Atlassian (the JIRA company).
I could make it work with the default/base model (GPT 4.1) and it’s pretty decent. It’s even better with Claude 4 Sonnet but that will use up your credits and the $10 plan gives you (I think) 350 questions a month with these so-called premium models, while with the base you have literally unlimited queries, which is something you don’t really see much with these coding agents (believe me, I’ve looked!).
So I’d say the base model is at around 80-90% of the premium, and it’s free. Most of the time it works just as well. It’s most obvious when you push it or start piling up the code and it gets messy. I initially built a feature in a web app with the base (GPT) which took around 2000 lines total, and after realizing that there was a lot of repeated code and such, I asked the premium (Sonnet) to analyze the code and tell me how it would refactor it… And it did. In one go. Cut it down to 1000 lines. And it actually worked! I know luck factored into it, but that right there proved why Sonnet is superior to GPT. And I used both through Github Copilot.
Basically what I’m saying is that Github Copilot is essentially Cursor if you use the Sonnet model. But the problem is that you can’t get as many Sonnet queries with Github as you get with the Cursor $20 plan (which is around 2000 questions a month). In my case, since my company pays for both, I switched to Cursor. For free Claude access with an obscenely high daily token limit, I recommend Rovo Dev from Atlassian (the JIRA company).