It burns tokens if you BYOK but you can hook into GH Copilot LLMs directly

I really like the orchestrator and architect personas as is out of the box. I prefer it over Cursor / Windsurf for a few reasons - no indexing (double edged sword) - orchestrator I find much more useful than windsurf cascades - tool usage is fantastic

The no indexing is a double edged sword, it does need to read files constantly, contributing to token burn. However, you don't have to worry about indexed data being on a 3rd party server (cursor), and also since it has to crawl to understand the codebase for it to implement, to me it seems like it is more capable of trickier code implementations, as long as you utilize context properly.

For more complex tasks, I usually either spend 20-30 minutes writing a prompt to give it what I'm looking to implement, or write up a document detailing the approach I'd like to take and iterate with the architect agent.

Afterwards, hand it off to the orchestrator and it manages and creates subtasks, which is to provide targeted implementation steps / tasks with a fresh context window.

If you have a GH Copilot license already, give it a shot. I personally think it's a good balance between control as an architect and not having to tie my time down for implementations, since really a lot of the work in coding is figuring out the implementation plan anyways, and the coding can be busy work, to me personally anyways. I prefer it over the others as I feel Windsurf/Cursor encourages YOLO too much.