Effective Tokens replaced by AI Credits

Jun 8, 2026

In the latest gh-aw build, Effective Tokens (ET) have been replaced by AI Credits (AIC) as the primary spend metric.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

gh aw audit and gh aw logs report AI Credits as the primary spend metric.
Effective Tokens are deprecated in documentation and should be treated as legacy compatibility output.
Cost reporting and budget discussions should use AIC values.

For repositories that need automatic workflow updates, run:

gh aw fix --write

Verify the change

gh aw fix --write rewrites the obsolete budget fields in workflow frontmatter, converting max-effective-tokens to max-ai-credits and max-daily-effective-tokens to max-daily-ai-credits (10,000 ET = 1 AIC). A successful run prints a summary such as:

✓ Fixed 3 of 12 workflow files

To confirm the migration took effect:

Re-run the command without --write. When nothing is left to migrate it reports:
Terminal window
```
gh aw fix
```
```
✓ No workflow fixes needed
```

Review the rewritten frontmatter:

git diff .github/workflows

max-effective-tokens: 1000000
max-ai-credits: 100
max-daily-effective-tokens: 5000000
max-daily-ai-credits: 500

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 after the fix, its value is an expression, which the migration intentionally skips. Update those values by hand.

Metric reference

AI Credits (AIC): primary spend metric (1 AIC = $0.01 USD)
Effective Tokens (ET): deprecated legacy metric

Effective Tokens replaced by AI Credits

What this means in practice

Verify the change

Metric reference

Where to read more