Posts from March 17, 2026

I don't know if it's just that GitHub Copilot is having a bad time at the moment, or if I've run into a genuine problem, but all isn't well today. After merging last night's result I kicked off another request related to a group of changes I want to make to BlogMore. It's a little involved, and it did take it a wee while to work on, but mostly it got the work done.

Again, as I said in the earlier post, I won't get into the detail of these changes yet, but they're fairly extensive and do include some breaking changes, so it's probably going to take a wee while to have it all come together. Claude's first shot at the latest change was almost there but with the glaring bug that it did all the work but didn't actually add the part that reads the configuration file settings and uses them (yeah, that's a good one, isn't it?).

So I asked it to fix it. It went off, worked on the issue, and then suddenly...

This surprised me. After the past few weeks I've had sessions where I've requested it do things way more frequently than this morning. I'm also nowhere near out of premium requests either:

While the error, as shown, might be valid and might be down to my actions, it's massively unhelpful and doesn't really explain what I did to cause this or even how I can remedy it. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that it seems to be saying I need to wait <duration> to try again. Yes, literally a placeholder of <duration>. O_o

One thing is for sure: this is another useful experiment in the current experiment. It's worth having the experience of having the tool screw with the flow. It doesn't come as a surprise, but it's a good reminder that using an agent that is hosted by someone else means you fully rely on their ability to keep it working, the whims of their API limits, and perhaps even your ability to pay.

Yesterday evening, after dinner, but just before loading up a game released just a few hours earlier, I decided to kick off a change to BlogMore. Part of the ongoing experiment is this convenience aspect: where I can get some work going and then go and do something entirely different.

The nature of the change itself isn't important (I'll write about it when I release an update), but something that happened is. As usual, I did the prompt as an issue, and assigned it to Copilot. The first thing that was curious was that, after around 5 minutes, despite it having added the 👀 reaction (which it seems to use to indicate the agent has seen it has work to do), nothing happened. I didn't see an agent kick off doing the work. Eventually I gave up waiting and opened a Copilot session and asked it to set about dealing with the issue I'd raised.

It did as I requested, but apparently alongside another agent which had suddenly started doing the exact same work. Thinking it was a glitch (it's not like GitHub hasn't been having some trouble of late) I stopped the newest one and let the "original" go about its work.

A wee bit later, just before I started up my game and the stream, I checked in on how it was doing. It had finished, but in a quick test, I noticed a small bug. I prompted it to fix the problem, closed the tab, and went about the real business of killing bugs.

Fast forward a couple of hours, I was done with getting my arse kicked on Klendathu, I packed away my controller and headset and opened GitHub again to see where Copilot was at. It wasn't good:

@davep The model claude-sonnet-4.6 is not available for your account. This can happen if the model was disabled by your organization's policy or if your Copilot plan doesn't include access to it.

You can try again without specifying a model (just @copilot) to use the default, or choose a different model from the model picker.

If you want to contact GitHub about this error, please mention the following identifier so they can better serve you: 79b81d32-e26a-4898-bd41-4bba088d08f6

Wait... what? I've been using this for weeks now, as best as I can tell I've generally been making all the changes and improvements using Claude Sonnet 4.6; there's never been an issue. Then, suddenly, in the middle of a PR, I don't have it?

Quickly checking elsewhere, sure enough, I had access to almost no models. I can't remember what there was, but it wasn't much and all the Claude ones had disappeared. Even if I tested in the Copilot CLI¹ I saw a very limited set of models.

Around this time I had two reactions: one was something like "cool, this is an important part of the experiment, knowing how it goes if your models are taken from you", the other was a curious "but Claude and I have an understanding about this codebase I can't trust some other model I've not been using".

As it was getting late into the evening and I still wanted to watch an episode of Stargate SG-1 (yes, I'm doing a full rewatch given it's on Netflix) I closed the MacBook and decided to check in on the issue in the morning.

Fast forward one SG1 episode later and, just before I headed to bed, I decided to do a quick search. While it could be a problem with my own account, it felt like it was more of a general issue. It was more of a general issue. At that point (around 23:20 UTC), checking in the GitHub app on my phone, I could see that some, if not all, of the models I was used to seeing, had come back.

As of this morning, as of time of writing, it's all looking back to how it was.

All of which is a great reminder, and something useful in the experiment: what does happen when some third party takes away the models you're using to get your work done? In the time I've been building up BlogMore I've come to trust the quality of Claude Sonnet (in the sense that I know when and where I have to pay closer attention to what it's done, and where it'll very likely have done a pretty good job²), so finding that I'd possibly have to switch to some other model that I've had no experience with... I genuinely had a moment of concern about how and where I was going to take BlogMore.

Ultimately it's not actually a serious concern for me: while I aim to maintain it for a very long time to come (it is how I'm creating the site for this blog after all), BlogMore isn't that critical. Moreover, I know I could cease using Copilot to create and maintain it and I could tidy up the code and hand-update and hand-manage it. There's a reason why I decided to really dive into this using a language I'm extremely confident with.

But for those applications some might now be relying on, developed by someone keen but as yet unskilled, what way forward for them if such a situation were to happen and not be resolved?