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Effective Tokens replaced by AI Credits

Copilot
Copilot

In gh-aw, Effective Tokens (ET) have been replaced by AI Credits (AIC) as the primary spend metric.

This change reflects GitHub Copilot billing and models.dev pricing. It makes spend tracking directly aligned to monetary cost instead of a normalized token proxy.

What this means in practice

Section titled “What this means in practice”
  • gh aw audit and gh aw logs report AI Credits as the primary spend metric.
  • Effective Tokens are retired in maintained surfaces and should be treated as historical context.
  • Cost reporting and budget discussions should use AIC values.

Verify the change

Section titled “Verify the change”

Current gh-aw versions no longer ship the automatic ET-to-AIC fixer. Update obsolete budget fields in workflow frontmatter by hand, converting max-effective-tokens to max-ai-credits and max-daily-effective-tokens to max-daily-ai-credits (10,000 ET = 1 AIC).

To confirm the migration took effect:

  1. Review the rewritten frontmatter:

    Terminal window
    git diff .github/workflows
    max-effective-tokens: 1000000
    max-ai-credits: 100
    max-daily-effective-tokens: 5000000
    max-daily-ai-credits: 500

  2. Recompile so the lock files pick up the new limits:

    Terminal window
    gh aw compile

If a workflow still uses max-effective-tokens or max-daily-effective-tokens, update those values by hand.

Metric reference

Section titled “Metric reference”
  • AI Credits (AIC): primary spend metric (1 AIC = $0.01 USD)
  • Effective Tokens (ET): deprecated legacy metric

Where to read more

Section titled “Where to read more”