It feels like every morning, cycling to work is basically playing cat and mouse with the traffic police. The intersection he waits at is different every day. Today I still took my usual route, but when I was almost at the office, I saw traffic police at that intersection stopping several people up ahead. Luckily, I was wearing glasses and could see from a distance, so I quickly turned around and found another way.

After so many days of dodging and hiding, I feel like I can now pretty much figure out the traffic police's movements, and I've also discovered many routes that can get me to the office. No matter which way I go, I no longer have to worry about running into unexpected situations.

Last night, before going to bed, I remotely connected to my work computer and left an Agent running to write code. When I turned on the screen today, I immediately saw some devastating news. The seller on Xianyu last time really hadn't lied to me—GitHub's ban on Copilot is indeed strict.

No access to GitHub Copilot found. You are currently logged in as ikxin.

Yes, my employee has quit for the third time. Actually, based on my experience from the previous few times, I was already mentally prepared this time. As of yesterday, I had only used about 20% of the quota in total, and there had actually been warning signs a few days ago.

The last time I was running a relatively large project, the Opus 4.6 model frequently popped up the message “you have reached the rate limit, please wait a moment,” but there was also a funny misunderstanding: I mistook a moment for a month, which gave me quite a scare because I thought I had been banned for a month.

It turns out I was celebrating too early. This time, I really have been banned, I guess. Later, I took a look around Xianyu and found that all similar products had either been taken down or had gone up in price. Now there is only the official direct top-up service, which costs over 200 yuan a month. Converted to US dollars, it is still somewhat cheaper than the official price.

Even so, over 200 yuan a month was still beyond my budget, so I spent almost the entire day today tinkering with domestic alternatives. I discovered that quite a few Chinese large-model companies seem to have already made it into the top tier.

The models from companies such as MiniMax, GLM, and Kimi all perform quite well in benchmarks. On top of that, Xiaomi just released MiMo-V2-Pro today, but these are not cheap either.

Moreover, almost all providers' Coding plans have started using scarcity marketing. You have to squat there at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning to grab a spot. I tried this morning but didn't get one. I'll see how it goes tomorrow.

I had always been using the Copilot plugin, but after being banned, I can only start switching to coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenCode that can connect to third-party services. I'm really not used to the CLI workflow, so I'll have to spend some time learning it.

It wasn't until shortly before the end of the workday that HR told me the monitor I bought yesterday had arrived and asked me to pick it up at the office tomorrow. That means tomorrow I'll finally be able to use my first 4K monitor to write code. Feels great!

The A-share market had yet another stock-market crash today. Nearly 5,000 stocks were awaiting gains, and the index fell below 4,000 points during the session. It only climbed back above 4,000 after quantitative buying was triggered near the close. I had been sitting on an unrealized profit of over 800 yuan at the day's peak, but it was ultimately dragged down as well. Fortunately, I was still holding PetroChina and CNOOC, these two oil stocks, which surged against the trend today. At the close, they barely managed to preserve a profit of a few dozen yuan.