> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.
Microslop for a while now seems to be testing exactly how much you can abuse the user before they move somewhere else. Windows is a prime example. Everything is ads, tracking, popups, annoyances, etc.
They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.
Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…
* checks notes *
Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of everything. And some shit about windows developers which isn’t exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS itself.
Microsoft can show a screen-wide dick enlarger ad instead of everyone's wallpaper and people will still be using windows for decades. They already know it.
Spent yesterday pruning dependencies in a project. Cut half of them and everything still worked. Makes you wonder how much stuff we pull in without thinking about it. Same thing with AI-generated PRs honestly, one bad suggestion and it ships.
Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.
You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.
OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).
It’s like how Disney Plus “ad free” tier shows you ads for Hulu and Disney Perks. They probably redefine “ad” in their terms of service so their own ads are called something else.
I looked into it at one point, as I was disgusted by the unskippable advertisements when paying for an ad-free tier on one of the myriad streaming platforms. Apparently, they distinguish between "advertisements" for a product or service and "promotions" for themselves. I get why that would be a reasonable internal distinction, as the former would require sign-off from the business paying for the advertisement, while the latter would only need internal approval, but it's a pointless distinction after that.
It's definitely an ad, I think the only real question is whether it's just marketing Copilot or whether part of their partnership with other companies is advertising the integration in this way. The links all go to Copilot docs pages on the integrations, so they're not typical tracked link advertising campaigns.
Honestly, it being a "tip" or "ad" is exactly the same.
What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and accept that it's not an ad, and I can just about see from a certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe that, it's still completely unacceptable.
Calling it a "tip" is definitely just a semantic trick to make it slightly less easy to frame a negative response and galvanise opinion against the practise. Reminds me a bit of confirmation shaming (which, now I think about it, I haven't seen in a while) where you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list".
I do think it's just an ad. Also it's a bad kind of one because 1) it disguises itself as a tip 2) makes people to think if it's an ad for Raycast or other services, when actually it's just promoting itself.
It’s a spot that will easily be replaced with paid ads, for sure. Not sure why it wouldn’t be better to just inject this sort of message into the UI instead of editing the PR text itself. (Except that the team implementing it probably couldn’t get the UI team to agree.)
> Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad.
No, they don't.
> edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.
You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such?
That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.
This tip/ad discussion reminds me of the equally idiotic and misleading Facebook post types. Instead of the correctly labeling all ads as, well, ads, Facebook have some ads called "suggested for you", some are completely unlabeled with only a "follow" button to start following, some ads are labeled as "sponsored" etc. I think they are doing this to evade legal limitations they might have otherwise. Last time I used Facebook it showed me 25 ads in a row (I counted), without any of my hundreds of follows with active feeds. Truly insane company.
Their mistake was editing it into the text bodies, rather than making it a separate element of the page. No doubt they were trying to inhibit adblockers but it’s so much worse a problem for them this way, because they’re presenting an ad in the voice and userpic of the account that made the post.
Tim from the Copilot coding agent team here. We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.
> We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.
That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast? But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.
No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever.
This is how you get your software banned at large companies.
Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes men, not actual developers.
This is the real question. If they are serious about not doing something like this again, they NEED to look at what process failed and let something like this get proposed, designed, implemented and pushed to production. Usually things get reviewed at each stage. Did the people who pushed back on this get steam rolled? If no one pushed back, that's an even serious culture question and the entire org would need training.
A serious "we won't do it again", needs to be accompanied by a COE on this for identifying what went wrong, and identifying what guardrails can be put in place and then actually implementing them.
Having worked in such environments. This particular team will try not to do it again
But many other teams didn't make the commitment or learn any lesson. And even the original team will churn over people and people will forget or new leadership comes in.
I believe they were being sincere but reality is often more complicated than 1 persons statement.
Wait! I think most people missed your "touched by Copilot" disclaimer.
Over on twitter, someone from MS said that Copilot can modify PRs simply because they were mentioned?
I've been using GitHub since it was new and heavily rely on coding agents for development, but that's an insanely large security hole. There's clearly confusion about what copilot is and is not able to edit elsewhere in this thread.
I'm backing up old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable.
I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.
> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent
If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement.
In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.
Nah, PR text is a completely inappropriate place for a tip to appear. A PR description should describe the contents of the PR, not include unrelated, unsolicited advice. It’d be like submitting a bug fix, and saying “this PR fixes bug X, and also, have you considered using a different linter in this project?” Completely inappropriate.
To be honest, just a user here, it’s only recently (like a week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR, historically it’s had to open a new one (that merged back to original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to edit existing PRs
(Now imagine this edited into the post you just made for a more-apt comparison)
If you do work at MS, I cannot believe any person involved legit thought it was "just a tip and nobody will mind their posts being edited to include product recommendations". I don't know what other parts of your comment are honest if the core statement is false
You should gather together your team and look through the responses to this thread together. There are a lot of emotions in these comments, but it could be a very constructive experience if you're able to put that aside. I'm sure you're aware that customer-sentiment toward Github has been poor lately, but these commenters are your customers. I believe Github has the potential to win back loyalty, but it will require a deeper understanding of your customer segment.
Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it. So… is this just demonstrating that the internal culture emphasises other things than user happiness?
I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?
We don’t like ads, my man. There are too many MBAs in that company now. MBA holders lose contact with reality about halfway through that degree. Do not listen to them. They will destroy any product they touch if given enough time.
> The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow.
I appreciate the rest of your reply, but it would be generous to say you're stretching the truth here. Yes, the official MS statement is that these are "tips", but you, I, and everyone else here knows what this is.
Including ads in Copilot-generated content (that is clearly marked as such or approved by a human before being posted in their name) would be a bad judgement call. Adding ads to other people's human-written content, without their knowledge or informed consent, is a criminally bad judgement call if it was intentional. And I don't use the term metaphorically: You're impersonating other people to post your advertising in their name. You are pretending that Zach Manson finds your product so awesome that he includes a recommendation for it in PRs that he personally posts.
Imagine what Microsoft's lawyers would do to me if I made a billboard "<my random product> is awesome, use it -- Satya Nadella" and started sticking it all over the city.
I don't see any effort to remediate it. Have you informed people whose names you used to post the ads and offered them to remove the ads?
I know this is not the right place for this but if there's any chance you could send this link to someone internal at Github who knows how to fix this, that would be awesome! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577
It's only semi-related in that it's a similar string thats appearing in millions of repos due to a Github feature change, but it's now polluting Google search results with tons of duplicate URLs unnecessarily. Issue has 100+ votes but has been entirely ignored by Github team.
WE won't see it happen again ... UNTIL IT DOES! You guys are disingenuous actors. Bad faith and all that.
See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV, and when you get that paybump/position you want some other completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same. exact. thing.
Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.
You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree? I don’t think this problem can be solved while leadership is focused only on adding more slop.
I'm sure there was push-back, but only inside the minds of the rank-and-file. Nobody would have dared to actually speak out against it, as it would be career limiting. That's probably how a lot of these boneheaded decisions happen: It's an Emperor's New Clothes situation, nobody speaks up, and then the emperor is satisfied that the decision is great.
Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement:
"We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability"
This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect.
---
Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit.
Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.
This feels a bit threatening. Just want to call it out. I also disagree with the decision but I respect that someone came forward and took responsibility. That helps build our shared understanding of what happened. It’s hard and not something we should discourage.
Please don't attack people for showing up to engage in discussion like this. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it quickly becomes part of mob behavior. We don't want that on HN for obvious reasons, and I'm sure nobody intends it, exactly, but it happens all too easily anyhow.
I’ve felt similarly about moving off GitHub. I bought a small 5U server rack years ago for my home network setup.
I’m considering getting a 1U device to host my own git server. I feel like if I move off, I should do it generally vs just moving to another provider who may also pull shenanigans.
New Section J — AI features, training, and your data: We’ve added a dedicated section that brings all AI-related terms together in one place. Unless you opt out, you grant GitHub and our affiliates a license to collect and use your inputs (e.g., prompts and code context) and outputs (e.g., suggestions) to develop, train, and improve AI models.
We should not be using Copilot in the first place.
Yeah, but it's a shitty move though - it should be by default opt-in, rather than opt-out. Imagine, you just continue coding normally consciously avoiding co-pilot only to find out that Github has been secretly training their models on your code, just because you forgot to toggle a setting off which was turned on without your knowledge, which they didn't even have the decency to email you about, but just posted on a blog no one reads.
It still exists. It's practically unusable without an adblocker (like slashdot) but the occasional old project is hosted there (particularly CDE. how the mighty have fallen)
What an absolute mess. It's like some dystopian future where a man is laying in a casket, nearly dead, and on the casket's ceiling, inches from his face, is a screen with an ad blaring to drink more Diet Fanta.
The ads are annoying, and I'm glad Microsoft will stop doing it.
One thing I do like, however, is how agents add themselves as co-authors in commit messages. Having a signal for which commits are by hand and which are by agent is very useful, both for you and in aggregate (to see how well you are wielding AI, and the quality of the code being generated).
Even when I edit the commit message, I still leave in the Claude co-author note.
AI coding is a new skill that we're all still figuring out, so this will help us develop best practices for generating quality code.
I don't quite see the benefit of this, personally.
Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it? The quality+understanding bar shouldn't change just because "oh idk claude wrote this part". You don't get extra leeway just because you saved your own time writing the code - that fact doesn't benefit me/the project in any way.
Likewise, leaving AI attribution in will probably have the opposite effect as well, where a perfectly good few lines of code gets rejected because some reviewer saw it was claude and assumed it was slop. Neither of these cases seems helpful to anyone (obviously its not like AI can't write a single useable line of code).
The code is either good or it isn't, and you either understand it or you don't. Whether you or claude wrote it is immaterial.
You're quite right that the quality of the code is all that matters in a PR. My point is more historical.
AI is a very new tool, and as such the quality of the code it produces depends both on the quality of the tool, and how you've wielded it.
I want to be able to track how well I've been using the tool, to see what techniques produce better results, to see if I'm getting better. There's a lot more to AI coding than just the prompts, as we're quickly discovering.
As a reviewer, I do care. Sure, people should be reviewing Claude-generated code, but they aren't scrutinizing it.
Claude-generated code is sufficient—it works, it's decent quality—but it still isn't the same as human written code. It's just minor things, like redundant comments that waste context down the road, tests that don't test what they claim to test, or React components that reimplement everything from scratch because Claude isn't aware of existing component libraries' documentation.
But more importantly, I expect humans to be able to stand by their code, and at times defend against my review. But today's agents continue to sycophantically treat review comments like prompts. I once jokingly commented on a line using a \u escape sequence to encode an em dash, how LLMs would do anything to sneak them in, and the LLM proceeded to replace all — with --. Plus, agents do not benefit from general coding advice in reviews.
Ultimately, at least with today's Claude, I would change my review style for a human vs an agent.
Knowing if an AI contributed is good data. The human is still responsible for the content of the PR.
While code is good or not, evaluating it is a bit of a subjective exercise. We like to think we are infallible code evaluating machines. But the truth is, we make mistakes. And we also shortcut. So knowing who made the commit, and if they used AI can help us evaluate the code more effectively.
It’s not about who wrote it, but about who is submitting it. The LLM co-author indicates that the agent submitted it, which is a contraindication of there being a human taking responsibility for it.
That being said, it also matters who wrote it, because it’s more likely for LLMs to write code that looks like quality code but is wrong, than the same is for humans.
> Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it?
Maybe one day we can say that, but currently, it matters a lot to a lot of people for many reasons.
Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it?
The problem is that submitters often do not feel responsible for it anymore. They will just feed review comments back to the LLM and let the LLM answer and make fixes.
This is disrespectful of the maintainers' time. If the submitter is just vibe/slop coding without any effort on their part, it's less work to do it myself directly using an LLM than having to instruct someone else's LLM through GitHub PR comments.
In this case it's better to just submit an issue and let me just implement it myself (with or without an LLM).
If the PR has a _co-authored by <LLM>_ signal, then I don't have to spend time giving detailed feedback under the assumption that I am helping another human.
Yes. I don't mind AI submissions to my hobby projects as long as there's a person behind it. Only fully automated slop I mind. Before AI I used to get all sorts of PRs from people changing a comment or a line of documentation just so they can get more green squares on their GitHub summary. Plus ça change....
A line at the bottom of PRs, reports, etc that says "authored with the help of Copilot" is fine.
So, philosophically speaking, I agree with this approach. But I did read that there was some speculation regarding the future legal implications of signalling that an AI wrote/cowrote a commit. I know Anthropic's been pretty clear that we own the generated code, but if a copyright lawsuit goes sideways (since these were all built with pirated data and licensed code) — does that open you or your company up to litigation risk in the future?
And selfishly — I'd rather not run into a scenario where my boss pulls up GitHub, sees Claude credited for hundreds of commits, and then he impulsively decides that perhaps Claude's doing the real work here and that we could downsize our dev team or replace with cheaper, younger developers.
Let your employer's lawyers worry about that. If they say not to use LLMs, then you should abide by that or find a new job. But if they don't care, then why should you?
As for hobby projects, I strongly encourage you to not care. You aren't going to lawyer up to sue anybody, nor is anybody going to sue you, so YOLO. Do whatever satisfies you.
> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
I’m grateful they disabled it, but their response still feels a bit tone deaf to me.
> Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
This sounds like they are saying “thanks for your input!”, when really it feels more like “if you didn’t go out of your way to complain, we would have left it in forever!”
Of course they would have. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Why do you think governments spend billions upon trillions trying to get their citizens to essentially "shut up" instead of improving their conditions?
I've not seen any evidence that these were ads and not "tips".
Ads implies someone was paying for them. Promoting internal product features is not the same thing - if it was then every piece of software that shows a tip would be an ad product, and would be regulated as such.
Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?
Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that comment was added by Raycast?
I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's. We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
This is unsolicited advertisement impersonating the developer (yes people can guess, but this still places it inside a message of the developer and in difference to e.g. mail programs doing it it's not placing it in the draft),
I strongly suspect that this is already illegal - publicity rights are a thing - and the the demand that needs to be made is for the law to be enforced.
I actually love these ads and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author.
Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to label themselves, honestly.
I’m not against AI coding tools, but I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
It's not a self-own, it's honest disclosure. It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own. Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.
> It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own.
I disagree on that. It's really a gray area.
If it's some lazy vibecoded shit, I think what you say totally applies.
If the human did the thinking, gave the agent detailed instructions, and/or carefully reviewed the output, then I don't think it's so clear cut.
And full disclosure, I'm reacting more to copilot here, which lists itself as the author and you as the co-author. I'm not giving credit to the machine, like I'm some appendage to it (which is totally what the powers-that-be want me to become).
> Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.
Should Word set itself as my coauthor when it autocompletes some sentences for me? If I use Claude/Word to write something, then I am the only author, since Claude/Word is not a person, and Claude/Word did nothing without my direction. It's not unethical to not disclose the tools I use to produce my work. They're just tools, smdh.
> […] and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author.
> Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
I was doing the opposite when using ChatGPT. Specifically manually setting the git commit author as ChatGPT complete with model used, and setting myself as committer. That way I (and everyone else) can see what parts of the code were completely written by ChatGPT.
For changes that I made myself, I commit with myself as author.
Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?
> I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to label themselves, honestly.
"Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?"
Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for it, and actually choose to PR it in its ultimate form.
What utility do the reviews/maintainers get from you marking whats written by you vs. chatgpt? Other than your ability to scapegoat the LLM?
The only thing that actually affects me (the hypothetical reviewer) and the project is the quality of the actual code, and, ideally, the presence of a contributer (you) who can actually answer for that code. The presence or absence of LLM generated code by your hand makes no difference to me or the project, why would it? Why would it affect my decision making whatsoever?
Its your code, end of story. Either that or the PR should just be rejected, because nobody is taking responsibility for it.
> Why would I commit something written by AI as myself?
I don't use any paid AI models (for all my usecases, free models usually work really well) and so for some small scripts/prototypes, I usually just use even sometimes the gemini model but aistudio.google.com is good one too.
I then sometimes, manually paste it and just hit enter.
These are prototypes though, although I build in public. Mostly done for experimental purpoess.
I am not sure how many people might be doing the same though.
But in some previous projects I have had projects stating "made by gemini" etc.
maybe I should write commit message/description stating AI has written this but I really like having the msg be something relevant to the creation of file etc. and there is also the fact that github copilot itself sometimes generate them for you so you have to manually remove it if you wish to change what the commit says.
I'm not against putting AI as coauthor, but removing the human who allowed the commit to be pushed/deployed from the commit would be a security issue at my job. The only reason we're allowed to deploy code with a generic account is that we tag the repo/commit hash, and we wrote a small piece of code that retrieve the author UID from git, so that in the log it say 'user XXXNNN opened the flux xxx' (or something else depending on what our code does)
I just submitted my first Claude authored application to Github and noticed this. I actually like it, although anthropomorphizing my coding tools seems a bit weird, it also provides a transparent way for others to weigh the quality of the code.
It didn’t even strike me as relevant to hide it, so I’d not exactly call it lazy, rather ask why bother pretending in first place?
Looking back, it would have been neat to have more metadata in my old Git commits. Were there any differences when I was writing with IntelliJ vs VSCode?
I understand what it's doing. I'm just saying that I'll take any signals I can get that someone is lazily submitted LLM-generated work without edit or review.
If you saw this line in a commit, you'd know exactly where it came from.
I actually like the Claude's Co-Authored-By: line very much. Even in my personal repositories, where I'm the sole author and the sole reader, I would like to know if my older commit I'm looking at was vibe coded, implying possibly lower quality or weird logical issues with the code.
So, my personal rule is: if I implemented a feature with Claude, I'll ask it to commit the code and it will add Co-Authored-By. If I made the change manually, I'll commit it myself.
> was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
As others mentioned, this is very intentional for me now as I use agents. It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you would think that? I assume vibe coded PRs are easy enough to spot by the contents alone.
> I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
What makes you think the LLM is doing _all_ of the work? Is it really an impossibility that an agent does 75% of the work and then a responsible human reviews the code and makes tweaks before opening a PR?
> It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you would think that?
Because even with as far as Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 have come, they still produce a lot of unwanted, unnecessary, or overly complex code when left to their own devices.
Vibe coding PRs and then submitting them as-is is lazy. Everyone should be reviewing and editing their own PRs before submission.
If you're just vibe coding and submitting, you're passing all of the work on to your team to review your AI's output.
> I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
Absolutely spot on. Maybe I'm old school, but I never let AI touch my commit message history. That is for me - when 6 months down the line I am looking at it, retracing my steps - affirming my thought process and direction of development, I need absolute clarity. That is also because I take pride in my work.
If you let an AI commit gibberish into the history, that pollution is definitely going to cost you down the line, I will definitely be going "WTF was it doing here? Why was this even approved?" and that's a situation I never want to find myself in.
Again, old man yells at cloud and all, but hey, if you don't own the code you write, who else will?
There will always be room for craftsmen stamping their work, like the expensive Japanese bonsai scissors. Most of the world just uses whatever mass-produced scissors were created by a system of rotating people, with no clear owner/maker. There's plenty of middle ground for systems who put their mark on their product.
If you architect and review everything, but someone else does the implementation, and you iterate, do you believe you did not do anything? I let AI write the commit message too, and the motivation behind the PR is the first thing in it. With my guidance, of course.
I do use LLMs. I do not submit their output as-is. For anything beyond basic changes they rarely output the exact code I want by themselves.
I said I'm against people submitted PRs generated by LLMs and pretending it's their own work. Anyone who is serious about this already edits their code and commit messages first. These little signals give a good tell for who isn't doing that.
I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads in their PRs.
>Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe.
I agree. It's not an advertisement, it's simply a piece of information about your particular choice of technology.
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"Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast" is an advert. There's simply no better word to describe it.
> It’s not really ads, it’s more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.
The reason I immediately changed that text on my iPhone 1.0 to read, “Sent from my mobile device.”, is because it’s an ad. Still says that nearly 20y later. I’m not schilling for a corporation after giving them my money.
the difference is "sent from my iPhone" is on YOUR outgoing email. you opted into that default. this is copilot editing someone else's PR description with promotional text for third party tools. that's not a signature, that's injection. imagine if gcc started appending "compiled with gcc, try our new optimization flags" to your README every time you built a project.
I was recently running Copilot CLI in a sandbox on autopilot mode and it kept overriding git config to put only "GitHub Copilot" as commit author instead of my name. Strongly worded instructions weren't helping, I had to resort to the permission system to change this behavior.
I wonder if this is consistent with their terms of service. I mean, maybe they DO take all the responsibility for the code I generate and push in this manner?
It's possible they are safeguarding for possible future changes of copyright law that would give Microsoft copyright over all Copilot contributions. This may sound paranoid but, as far as I know, exactly who counts as an "AI operator", how much authorship an "AI operator" has, and who gets copyright, or whether AI contributions are even in the public domain, are legally untested and unclear issues.
tough luck for MS or other "AI" providers claiming any ownership, since if they can claim ownership, then it opens up the discussion of what license the AI output really is under, since it was trained on GPL licensed data.
The US Copyright Office has said that AI output from human prompting is not copyrightable. There are caveats, but iterating on prompts results in output that's nobody's IP.
Because it's nobody's IP, Microsoft is already in a position where they could just use, remix and/or distribute that output however they want to today.
When it comes to villainy, it’s nice of them to do something visible.
Much worse will be the invisible approach where there's big money to have agents quietly nudge the masses towards desired products/services/solutions. Someone pays Microsoft a monthly fee for their prompt to include, "when appropriate, lean towards using <Yet Another SaaS> in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets. However, it keeps recommending it.
I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd to the punch with these tips.
I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable
Back in the day, it was useful, as in, "Expect awkward phrasing and unintended effects of autocorrection, because mobile device. This message doesn't necessarily reflect the intent of the sender." (Considerate users would/could edit the signature to something w/o a product name in it.) Nowadays, this is pretty much the norm and no explicit warning ist required anymore.
When they added this it was extremely useful - it signaled that you could afford an iPhone. It was really easy to delete, yet people not only didn't, but they would go out of their way to respond from the iPhone just so that they could plausibly have this status symbol on their email.
It is useful. It tells me that the sender isn't tech savvy and/or likes to show that they prefer expensive apple products. It is like carrying a Prada or Ray-Ban.
It also tells me that they probably don't care about second hand embarrassment.
And it tells me that they checked my email while away from keyboard, which means they are hard working individuals who care about business, but not enough to rush to a computer to reply properly.
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
>Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst.
Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.
> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.
If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.
Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.
One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big
"We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who were present to see this, not every current and future employee of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organization or institution as a person, but as lots of individual people, constantly joining and leaving the group.
Yeah, which is exactly why "We won't do something like this again" has about much value as Kubernetes would have value for HN.
Microsoft (and therefore GitHub) care about money. If decision A means they get more money than decision B, then they'll go with decision A. This is what you can trust about corporations.
Individuals (who constantly join and leave a corporation) can believe and say whatever they want, but ultimately the corporation as a being overrides it all, and tries it's best to leave shareholders better off, regardless of the consequences.
In principle, one could train the AI to insert ads in its answers. So no, if you only do inference locally with an open-weight model you are still not in control.
A little bit off topic but our company recently enforced Microsoft Authenticator for account login. Which I was mildly annoyed about but now I'm super pissed off because they have started abusing the notification permission granted to allow authenticator to work to push out ads for Microsoft 365. It feels like we've gone back to 90s Microsoft when everyone hated them.
Textbook permission abuse. Microsoft blurred the line between security notifications (approve/deny prompts) and marketing. Once users stop trusting notifications from your app, you've lost the channel entirely. Self-defeating strategy.
Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for blighted responses.
I have a somewhat similar problem with github issue templates. They automatically stuff I don't care about or would propose and structure things in ways I don't like. Granted, I can edited this away, but it requires extra time and makes filing issues more work than before. Biggest case in point is the "I will adhere to the Code of Conduct". In general I do not care about CoCs and it is fascinating how CoCs leak into everywhere for some so-called "open source" projects. They don't seem to understand the issue when the licence does not require a CoC; even then the issue is not about the CoC in and by itself (though I also find them pointless), but that extra content is automatically added to issue templates in general, CoCs just being one of many spam-options. And I also recall some donation-ads that are automatically added too - I have no problem when projects request financial support, but if I file an issue then the issue is about the content of the issue, not about anything else.
You have to think about the security implications of this.
How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.
A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.
One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Unless you're big enough like Meta, Microsoft, etc.
Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to just products even.
It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency. With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and there is no good way to show it to the user.
Presumably you need to pay raycast once for a setup operation while you need to pay constantly for copilot. Why wouldn't you advertise for someone who makes you more money at the same time as advertising for yourself?
this is the thing that keeps me up at night about AI tools across the board. the moment your tool starts optimizing for someone elses goals instead of yours the entire value propostion collapses. doesnt matter how good the output is if you cant trust the intent behind it. we already see this with AI image generators where certain styles get pushed becuase of partnerships or training data bias, you just dont notice it as easily as an ad in a PR
I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
the SourceForge parallel is what gets me. they did the exact same thing with installers and it killed them. people moved to GitHub specifically to get away from that.
1.5M PRs is wild though. that's a lot of repos where the "product tips" just sat there unchallenged because nobody reads bot-generated PR descriptions carefully enough. which is kinda the real problem here, not the ads themselves.
I really wish this was an April fools story. It's good to see that at least it has been disabled again, although I can't imagine that it will be long before this comes back again. Also, (I can't find it now, but) I thought there was an article here on HN recently that clarified that inference cost can probably be covered by the subscription prices, just not training costs?
1.5M records of PRs affected. Does Microsoft copilot ask users for the permission of adding ads inside their PRs before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
Now EVERYONE can see ads disguised as PRs on GitHub. Does Microsoft asks everyone for the permission of showing ads before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
It's the same with Claude Code actually, and recently Codex too...
Claude never used to do this but at some point it started adding itself by default as a co-author on every commit.
Literally, in the last week, Codex started making all it's branches as "codex-feature-name", and will continue to do so, even if you tell it to never do that again.
Adding the agent (and maybe more importantly, the model that review it) actually seems like a very useful signal to me. In fact, it really should become "best practice" for this type of workflow. Transparency is important, and some PMs may want to scrutinize those types of submissions more, or put them into a different pipeline, etc.
That Codex one comes from the new `github` plugin, which includes a `github:yeet` skill. There are several ways to disable it: you can disconnect github from codex entirely, or uninstall the plugin, or add this to your config.toml:
[[skills.config]]
name = "github:yeet"
enabled = false
I agree that skill is too opinionated as written, with effects beyond just creating branches.
What's weird is, I never installed any github plugins, or indeed any customization to Codex, other than updating using brew... so I was so confused when this started happening.
When I started my career there was this little company called SCO, and according to them finding a comment somewhere in someone’s suppliers code that matched “x < y” was serious enough to trip up the entire industry.
Now, with the power of math letting us recall business plans and code bases with no mention of copyright or where the underlying system got that code (like paying a foreign company to give me the kernel with my name replacing Linus’, only without the shame…), we are letting MS and other corps enter into coding automation and oopsie the name of their copyright-obfuscation machine?
Maybe it’s all crazy and we flubbed copyright fully, but having third party authorship stamps cryptographically verified in my repo sounds risky. The SCO thing was a dead companies last gasp, dying animals do desperate things.
Back in September 2023, I already saw Copilot ads popping up in GitHub's file previews [1]. After three years, it's wild to see how advertising has reached areas I honestly never thought it would.
We are not even there yet friend. Anthropic injects its own anthropic calls whenever you are doing anything related to llm call of you ask to it to fill some openai models .
Very soon the Moronhead CEOs will be paying for tons of stuff they cleared could have done in-house for their vibed aí project.
Microslop strikes again! AI implementations have really distilled all the shitty business practices tech companies have been doing into highly visible missteps.
It is interesting watching all these large companies essentially try to "start-up" these new products and absolutely fail.
Copilot added that block using the access you granted for a different purpose. That's the issue — not the content itself. When you give an agent write access to your PR, the implied scope is: act on the task I delegated. It doesn't include: acting on behalf of the platform that built you. The moment Copilot inserted something you didn't request, using your credentials, in your name, the agency relationship inverted. It stopped being your agent and became Microsoft's distribution channel with your access. The question isn't whether this counts as an "ad" or a "tip." The question is: does Copilot have an instruction source other than you? Here, the answer is yes. Which means you do not define the scope of what it might do with your access.
You don't have an agent. You have a privileged process that occasionally helps you.
So someone let a bot edit a PR unsupervised, or accepted its suggestion without even reading it, and now blames “Copilot” for editing the PR. Going public with that is hilarious. Hopefully they learn something from it.
Well, CoPilot is a GitHub technology, and they're telling you that AI wrote the PR. It's not _that_ bad. I suppose they could distill it to "Written with CoPilot" with a link for more information.
The future is here! Glorious ads that will make you so efficient! Save time coding by consuming ads, you were never going to attain expert level professional skills anyways.
This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot or GitHub here is not justified.
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
It took me some time to understand how big the advertisement market is, things flowing in the direction seem natural when it comes to making money out of the investment.
This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is all open source and only open source.
I remember open-source projects announcing their intent to leave GitHub in 2018, as it was being acquired by Microsoft. I was thinking to myself back then: "It's really just a free Git hosting service, and Git was designed to be decentralized at its very core. They don't own anything, only provide the storage and bandwidth. How are they even going to enshittify this?".
8 years later, this is where we are. I'm honestly just stunned, it takes some real talent to run a company that does it as consistently well as Microsoft.
If I recall correctly, what sparked the mass migration to GitHub was the controversy around SourceForge injecting ads into installers of projects hosted there. Now that we have tools that can stealthily inject native-looking ads into programs at the source code level...
Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git repository.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
50/50 it's a hallucination, and that's half the problem. Enshitification is something that happens all the time in the training data scraped from various websites, so yes, it's going to randomly toss out ads for shit, even when editing your PR descriptions.
Just a reminder, after 8 years of me telling people that hallucinations mathematically can't be eliminated, they finally admitted it's true. Claims that non LLM approaches can remove them are bogus. This technology was never going to work.
Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out. Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal communication between two people, only to find that some third party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
Similar to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states entropy tends to increase over time in a closed system, I propose the Nth Law of Privatization: enshitification tends to increase with market capitalization/share over time.
Enshittification will ruin AI the same way it ruined the WWW and YouTube. We're in the golden era right now. Not 2027, 2028. Now now. The ads are coming.
The path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected by Raycast.
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and if there's a human in the loop approving the change, certainly they can fix the typo themself.
I am doing my very small part by migrating large part of family and my employer away for a few years now. The world is better without Microslop. Buy unfortunately I know that this isn't always possible.
This "ad" is not exactly new. Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad. I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this.
https://github.com/PlagueHO/plagueho.github.io/pull/24#issue... Copilot has been adding "(emoji) (tip)" thing since May 2025. GitHub copilot was released in May 2025, so basically it has had an ad since beginning.
There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub. https://github.com/search?q=%22%3C%21--+START+COPILOT+CODING...
Here are some of them:
https://github.com/johannesPP/FS-Calculator/pull/2
> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
https://github.com/sharthomas645-tech/HybridAI-Next-React-Vi...
> Send tasks to Copilot coding agent from Slack and Teams to turn conversations into code. Copilot posts an update in your thread when it's finished.
Looks like MS really want to "give tips" about their new integrations.
edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.
> I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this.
I'm part of Raycast, we didn't know about it, learnt about it here
Creepy. Looks like they rolled it back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.
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I haven’t clicked through so all I know about Raycast is, “that’s the company that gets shoved into ads by copilot.”
Sounds like it’s not your fault but it’s probably doing some brand damage :/
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Maybe check if you are charged for it
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Microslop for a while now seems to be testing exactly how much you can abuse the user before they move somewhere else. Windows is a prime example. Everything is ads, tracking, popups, annoyances, etc.
They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.
Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…
* checks notes *
Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of everything. And some shit about windows developers which isn’t exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS itself.
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Microsoft can show a screen-wide dick enlarger ad instead of everyone's wallpaper and people will still be using windows for decades. They already know it.
If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot.
Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents.
This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.
"Reflections on Trusting Trust" for the new era. MSVC doesn't compile a secret master-password into your software, just a Copilot ad.
("Reflections on Trusting Trust" Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...)
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I wonder if there will come a time where I can pay M$ to sabotage my competition codebase
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Spent yesterday pruning dependencies in a project. Cut half of them and everything still worked. Makes you wonder how much stuff we pull in without thinking about it. Same thing with AI-generated PRs honestly, one bad suggestion and it ships.
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Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.
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Can somebody explain to me why this is legal?
If anybody but Microsoft does this, it's called malware and they'll end up with an FBI visit and prison time.
Why are the judicative so skewed here in their judgements?
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[flagged]
> There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub.
You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.
OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).
I wanted to say that they are same because they are "copilot-written self promotions", but I get your point.
Also I found this: https://github.com/Laravel-Backpack/medialibrary-uploaders/p... it seems like copilot added an ad on behalf of the user at Nov 2025(see last edit).
It’s like how Disney Plus “ad free” tier shows you ads for Hulu and Disney Perks. They probably redefine “ad” in their terms of service so their own ads are called something else.
Yeah it's just helpful tips and suggestions. It's a feature, you see!
I looked into it at one point, as I was disgusted by the unskippable advertisements when paying for an ad-free tier on one of the myriad streaming platforms. Apparently, they distinguish between "advertisements" for a product or service and "promotions" for themselves. I get why that would be a reasonable internal distinction, as the former would require sign-off from the business paying for the advertisement, while the latter would only need internal approval, but it's a pointless distinction after that.
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Microsoft would probably seriously refer to it as 'just the tip'.
You'll never guess what happens next.
(Hint: everyone knows what happens next)
AI clippy?
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It's definitely an ad, I think the only real question is whether it's just marketing Copilot or whether part of their partnership with other companies is advertising the integration in this way. The links all go to Copilot docs pages on the integrations, so they're not typical tracked link advertising campaigns.
Honestly, it being a "tip" or "ad" is exactly the same.
What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and accept that it's not an ad, and I can just about see from a certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe that, it's still completely unacceptable.
Calling it a "tip" is definitely just a semantic trick to make it slightly less easy to frame a negative response and galvanise opinion against the practise. Reminds me a bit of confirmation shaming (which, now I think about it, I haven't seen in a while) where you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list".
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I do think it's just an ad. Also it's a bad kind of one because 1) it disguises itself as a tip 2) makes people to think if it's an ad for Raycast or other services, when actually it's just promoting itself.
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Yep, the fact they're altering repo content with advertising is wholly unacceptable.
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It’s a spot that will easily be replaced with paid ads, for sure. Not sure why it wouldn’t be better to just inject this sort of message into the UI instead of editing the PR text itself. (Except that the team implementing it probably couldn’t get the UI team to agree.)
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A bit like "suggested apps" in the start menu. It's "suggestions" and certainly not paid ads.
It's gaslighting on a worldwide scale is what it is.
> Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad.
No, they don't.
> edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.
You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such?
That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.
> company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals
That's one reason I think they would argue it's not an ad. Another reasons are "recommendations" and "tips" and "suggestions" in my windows.
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This tip/ad discussion reminds me of the equally idiotic and misleading Facebook post types. Instead of the correctly labeling all ads as, well, ads, Facebook have some ads called "suggested for you", some are completely unlabeled with only a "follow" button to start following, some ads are labeled as "sponsored" etc. I think they are doing this to evade legal limitations they might have otherwise. Last time I used Facebook it showed me 25 ads in a row (I counted), without any of my hundreds of follows with active feeds. Truly insane company.
Their mistake was editing it into the text bodies, rather than making it a separate element of the page. No doubt they were trying to inhibit adblockers but it’s so much worse a problem for them this way, because they’re presenting an ad in the voice and userpic of the account that made the post.
It is clearly an ad, no doubt about that.
> Looks like MS really want to "give tips"
Including Windows, File Explorer, Start Menu, ...
It seems with the latest "ok we went too far" Win11 patch though, they got some tips back from their users.
It's an interesting model, makes me wonder if prolific open source contributors do it ("leave a tip if you like this MR" kind of thing).
This does not look like random chance. It's a pattern of behavior.
You just text replaced Ad with Tip, it’s still an ad
New age clippy no one wants but M$lop
Tim from the Copilot coding agent team here. We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.
> We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.
That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast? But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.
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Just to add to the feedback.
No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever.
This is how you get your software banned at large companies.
Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes men, not actual developers.
> did anyone on the team really not push back?
This is the real question. If they are serious about not doing something like this again, they NEED to look at what process failed and let something like this get proposed, designed, implemented and pushed to production. Usually things get reviewed at each stage. Did the people who pushed back on this get steam rolled? If no one pushed back, that's an even serious culture question and the entire org would need training.
A serious "we won't do it again", needs to be accompanied by a COE on this for identifying what went wrong, and identifying what guardrails can be put in place and then actually implementing them.
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They already know that nobody wants it. They don’t care.
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> We won't do something like this again.
Microsoft has been pulling user hostile crap for decades, so either "we" or "like this" (or both) is probably not super accurate. ;)
Having worked in such environments. This particular team will try not to do it again But many other teams didn't make the commitment or learn any lesson. And even the original team will churn over people and people will forget or new leadership comes in.
I believe they were being sincere but reality is often more complicated than 1 persons statement.
We will never do something like this unless we get caught
Wait! I think most people missed your "touched by Copilot" disclaimer.
Over on twitter, someone from MS said that Copilot can modify PRs simply because they were mentioned?
I've been using GitHub since it was new and heavily rely on coding agents for development, but that's an insanely large security hole. There's clearly confusion about what copilot is and is not able to edit elsewhere in this thread.
I'm backing up old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable.
I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.
If you don’t want copilot to work on your PRs, don’t ask it to.
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> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent
If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement.
In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.
Nah, PR text is a completely inappropriate place for a tip to appear. A PR description should describe the contents of the PR, not include unrelated, unsolicited advice. It’d be like submitting a bug fix, and saying “this PR fixes bug X, and also, have you considered using a different linter in this project?” Completely inappropriate.
To be honest, just a user here, it’s only recently (like a week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR, historically it’s had to open a new one (that merged back to original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to edit existing PRs
Tip: tomatoes are on offer at Contoso now!
(Now imagine this edited into the post you just made for a more-apt comparison)
If you do work at MS, I cannot believe any person involved legit thought it was "just a tip and nobody will mind their posts being edited to include product recommendations". I don't know what other parts of your comment are honest if the core statement is false
> We won't do something like this again.
This has just as much value as when an LLM claims it won't make a certain mistake again, and for exactly the same reason.
Thank you, Tim.
You should gather together your team and look through the responses to this thread together. There are a lot of emotions in these comments, but it could be a very constructive experience if you're able to put that aside. I'm sure you're aware that customer-sentiment toward Github has been poor lately, but these commenters are your customers. I believe Github has the potential to win back loyalty, but it will require a deeper understanding of your customer segment.
I’m curious how the decision to include ads like this was made. Is that something you can share?
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Hi Tim,
I see that you're a product manager at GitHub. Can you explain why you thought this feature was value-added?
Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it. So… is this just demonstrating that the internal culture emphasises other things than user happiness?
I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?
We don’t like ads, my man. There are too many MBAs in that company now. MBA holders lose contact with reality about halfway through that degree. Do not listen to them. They will destroy any product they touch if given enough time.
> The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow.
I appreciate the rest of your reply, but it would be generous to say you're stretching the truth here. Yes, the official MS statement is that these are "tips", but you, I, and everyone else here knows what this is.
"We won't do something like this again"
Sureeeeee
Will surely do something like another thing nobody wanted or needed instead.
Including ads in Copilot-generated content (that is clearly marked as such or approved by a human before being posted in their name) would be a bad judgement call. Adding ads to other people's human-written content, without their knowledge or informed consent, is a criminally bad judgement call if it was intentional. And I don't use the term metaphorically: You're impersonating other people to post your advertising in their name. You are pretending that Zach Manson finds your product so awesome that he includes a recommendation for it in PRs that he personally posts.
Imagine what Microsoft's lawyers would do to me if I made a billboard "<my random product> is awesome, use it -- Satya Nadella" and started sticking it all over the city.
I don't see any effort to remediate it. Have you informed people whose names you used to post the ads and offered them to remove the ads?
I know this is not the right place for this but if there's any chance you could send this link to someone internal at Github who knows how to fix this, that would be awesome! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577
It's only semi-related in that it's a similar string thats appearing in millions of repos due to a Github feature change, but it's now polluting Google search results with tons of duplicate URLs unnecessarily. Issue has 100+ votes but has been entirely ignored by Github team.
Who approved this dumbaz move? It’s clearly an Ad and calling it a tip is insulting
> The goal was to help developers
Is Microsoft receiving payments for these?
WE won't see it happen again ... UNTIL IT DOES! You guys are disingenuous actors. Bad faith and all that.
See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV, and when you get that paybump/position you want some other completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same. exact. thing.
Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.
Can I get that in writing in the ToS/EULA please?
For what it's worth, I appreciate that you took the time to address the issue and respond here, Tim.
This was obviously a terrible error of judgement. Will you be resigning over this?
You mean ads. Don't sugarcoat it. They are ads. Not tips. Ads.
So you continue to show ads to Copilt, just not to the user? If so, not a fix.
Shockingly poor judgment.
Thank you for listening.
I literally thought it was an early April fool's
mate nobody wants unwarranted tips. have you guys lost your mind
Huge miss. Again. And again. And again.
You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree? I don’t think this problem can be solved while leadership is focused only on adding more slop.
“We won’t do something like this again”
A verifiable claim! I put it at 75% you totally will, but if any manifolders think I’m full of it it should converge to something less cynical
https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...
Don’t worry, some alternate interpretation of the words “we”, “do”, or “like this” will allow a welch.
> A verifiable claim!
Once you put a deadline on it. As stated I don’t think it is.
I mean its microslop, it'll probably be back by the end of the week. They only know how to let people to say "yes" or "ask again later"
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Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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> But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call
Hi Tim.. Why is there no pushback from grounded individuals against these decisions ?
I'm sure there was push-back, but only inside the minds of the rank-and-file. Nobody would have dared to actually speak out against it, as it would be career limiting. That's probably how a lot of these boneheaded decisions happen: It's an Emperor's New Clothes situation, nobody speaks up, and then the emperor is satisfied that the decision is great.
> We won't do something like this again.
It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.
For some reason I don't believe you. When you do things like this, you lose trust. Work to get it back
Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement:
"We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability"
This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect.
---
Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit.
Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.
> We won't do something like this again.
it won't be an ad. It won't be a tip. It will be a suggestion! Recommendation! Opportunity!
Be like Discord, call it a “Quest”.
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This feels a bit threatening. Just want to call it out. I also disagree with the decision but I respect that someone came forward and took responsibility. That helps build our shared understanding of what happened. It’s hard and not something we should discourage.
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Please don't attack people for showing up to engage in discussion like this. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it quickly becomes part of mob behavior. We don't want that on HN for obvious reasons, and I'm sure nobody intends it, exactly, but it happens all too easily anyhow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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>It’s rather bold to post here…
it is rather nice, honestly. would you prefer to scream into the void and not get any response at all?
an open line of communication with the responsible people seems like literally the best possible option, why are you actively discouraging it?
>Maybe you all want to talk to Microsoft PR/legal before posting?
you would rather not hear anything, or get word-salad legalese that doesnt mean anything? how exactly would that be better?
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We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi...
That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488
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I’ve felt similarly about moving off GitHub. I bought a small 5U server rack years ago for my home network setup.
I’m considering getting a 1U device to host my own git server. I feel like if I move off, I should do it generally vs just moving to another provider who may also pull shenanigans.
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I feel like there is an even more important crisis that is being masked over here:
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv...
We should not be using Copilot in the first place.
OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.
> OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.
1. Everyone doing this doesn't mean it's acceptable.
2. Google Gemini explicitly says right under the chat box if you are a paid subscriber (Workspace):
Not sure about the others.
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Regarding Claude: As I have unticked the "Help improve Claude" checkbox, I was under the impression that Claude did not do this.
https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023555-how-do-you-u...
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Looks like you can disable it though:
https://github.com/settings/copilot/features
-> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"
Yeah, but it's a shitty move though - it should be by default opt-in, rather than opt-out. Imagine, you just continue coding normally consciously avoiding co-pilot only to find out that Github has been secretly training their models on your code, just because you forgot to toggle a setting off which was turned on without your knowledge, which they didn't even have the decency to email you about, but just posted on a blog no one reads.
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> Unless you opt out
(whether or not you should have to opt in or out is a different topic)
Well, you are not alone: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?
It still exists. It's practically unusable without an adblocker (like slashdot) but the occasional old project is hosted there (particularly CDE. how the mighty have fallen)
Another step into ensh*ttification? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
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I believe Codeberg is the new hotness
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Just more Microslop, amazing...
Sourcehut is pretty good if you're willing to pay the (very reasonable may I add) prices
SourceForge is still chugging along. It hosts some prominent projects:
https://sourceforge.net/directory/linux/
A few decades? Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
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> I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option.
It will be there for as long as you (and everyone else) keep using it.
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It will probably remain as a platform for a very long time.
It's baked in literally into every coding tutorial and is kind of industry standard, like JIRA. Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.
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Looks like there's a comment added by Copilot before any of these "tips" as well, so pretty sure this originates from Copilot and not Raycast: https://github.com/search?q=%22START+COPILOT+CODING+AGENT+TI...
Child comments here indicates its from Ray cast, and the messaging appears on gitlab too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
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What an absolute mess. It's like some dystopian future where a man is laying in a casket, nearly dead, and on the casket's ceiling, inches from his face, is a screen with an ad blaring to drink more Diet Fanta.
The ads are annoying, and I'm glad Microsoft will stop doing it.
One thing I do like, however, is how agents add themselves as co-authors in commit messages. Having a signal for which commits are by hand and which are by agent is very useful, both for you and in aggregate (to see how well you are wielding AI, and the quality of the code being generated).
Even when I edit the commit message, I still leave in the Claude co-author note.
AI coding is a new skill that we're all still figuring out, so this will help us develop best practices for generating quality code.
I don't quite see the benefit of this, personally.
Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it? The quality+understanding bar shouldn't change just because "oh idk claude wrote this part". You don't get extra leeway just because you saved your own time writing the code - that fact doesn't benefit me/the project in any way.
Likewise, leaving AI attribution in will probably have the opposite effect as well, where a perfectly good few lines of code gets rejected because some reviewer saw it was claude and assumed it was slop. Neither of these cases seems helpful to anyone (obviously its not like AI can't write a single useable line of code).
The code is either good or it isn't, and you either understand it or you don't. Whether you or claude wrote it is immaterial.
You're quite right that the quality of the code is all that matters in a PR. My point is more historical.
AI is a very new tool, and as such the quality of the code it produces depends both on the quality of the tool, and how you've wielded it.
I want to be able to track how well I've been using the tool, to see what techniques produce better results, to see if I'm getting better. There's a lot more to AI coding than just the prompts, as we're quickly discovering.
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As a reviewer, I do care. Sure, people should be reviewing Claude-generated code, but they aren't scrutinizing it.
Claude-generated code is sufficient—it works, it's decent quality—but it still isn't the same as human written code. It's just minor things, like redundant comments that waste context down the road, tests that don't test what they claim to test, or React components that reimplement everything from scratch because Claude isn't aware of existing component libraries' documentation.
But more importantly, I expect humans to be able to stand by their code, and at times defend against my review. But today's agents continue to sycophantically treat review comments like prompts. I once jokingly commented on a line using a \u escape sequence to encode an em dash, how LLMs would do anything to sneak them in, and the LLM proceeded to replace all — with --. Plus, agents do not benefit from general coding advice in reviews.
Ultimately, at least with today's Claude, I would change my review style for a human vs an agent.
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Knowing if an AI contributed is good data. The human is still responsible for the content of the PR.
While code is good or not, evaluating it is a bit of a subjective exercise. We like to think we are infallible code evaluating machines. But the truth is, we make mistakes. And we also shortcut. So knowing who made the commit, and if they used AI can help us evaluate the code more effectively.
It’s not about who wrote it, but about who is submitting it. The LLM co-author indicates that the agent submitted it, which is a contraindication of there being a human taking responsibility for it.
That being said, it also matters who wrote it, because it’s more likely for LLMs to write code that looks like quality code but is wrong, than the same is for humans.
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> Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it?
Maybe one day we can say that, but currently, it matters a lot to a lot of people for many reasons.
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Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it?
The problem is that submitters often do not feel responsible for it anymore. They will just feed review comments back to the LLM and let the LLM answer and make fixes.
This is disrespectful of the maintainers' time. If the submitter is just vibe/slop coding without any effort on their part, it's less work to do it myself directly using an LLM than having to instruct someone else's LLM through GitHub PR comments.
In this case it's better to just submit an issue and let me just implement it myself (with or without an LLM).
If the PR has a _co-authored by <LLM>_ signal, then I don't have to spend time giving detailed feedback under the assumption that I am helping another human.
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Stealing copyrighted code and calling it your own is not a "skill."
of course it is
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It's nice that you believe the goal most Ai code is striving for it "generataing quality code".
Yes. I don't mind AI submissions to my hobby projects as long as there's a person behind it. Only fully automated slop I mind. Before AI I used to get all sorts of PRs from people changing a comment or a line of documentation just so they can get more green squares on their GitHub summary. Plus ça change....
A line at the bottom of PRs, reports, etc that says "authored with the help of Copilot" is fine.
[dead]
So, philosophically speaking, I agree with this approach. But I did read that there was some speculation regarding the future legal implications of signalling that an AI wrote/cowrote a commit. I know Anthropic's been pretty clear that we own the generated code, but if a copyright lawsuit goes sideways (since these were all built with pirated data and licensed code) — does that open you or your company up to litigation risk in the future?
And selfishly — I'd rather not run into a scenario where my boss pulls up GitHub, sees Claude credited for hundreds of commits, and then he impulsively decides that perhaps Claude's doing the real work here and that we could downsize our dev team or replace with cheaper, younger developers.
Let your employer's lawyers worry about that. If they say not to use LLMs, then you should abide by that or find a new job. But if they don't care, then why should you?
As for hobby projects, I strongly encourage you to not care. You aren't going to lawyer up to sue anybody, nor is anybody going to sue you, so YOLO. Do whatever satisfies you.
If you're concerned about copyright risk, don't you want that kind of tagging so you could prove it wasn't used on particular code?
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I'm pretty sure IF a copyright lawsuit went sideways you would still be open to litigation risk, just hiding the evidence.
What you're doing would fundamentally be similar to copyright theft, using 'someone' else's code without attributing them (it?) to avoid repercussions
Obviously the morals and ethics of not attributing an LLM vs an actual human vary. I am not trying to simp for the machines here.
In case people missed it in the other thread, GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...
> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
I’m grateful they disabled it, but their response still feels a bit tone deaf to me.
> Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
This sounds like they are saying “thanks for your input!”, when really it feels more like “if you didn’t go out of your way to complain, we would have left it in forever!”
Of course they would have. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Why do you think governments spend billions upon trillions trying to get their citizens to essentially "shut up" instead of improving their conditions?
Accepting the megacorp euphemisms without critique ("product tips") is how enshittification festers.
I've not seen any evidence that these were ads and not "tips".
Ads implies someone was paying for them. Promoting internal product features is not the same thing - if it was then every piece of software that shows a tip would be an ad product, and would be regulated as such.
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But why run free advertising in the first place?
Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?
Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
Yes https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.
If they show the ad on github.com, agents accessing the PR using (an outdated, ad-free version of) gh CLI won’t see it. /s
(That said I’m rather skeptical of this and would like to see more details of the process that produced this, and proof.)
Edit: Just noticed this official GitHub blog post from last month advertising Raycast, making this story a lot more believable: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-17-assign-issues-to-co...
It could simply be something in the Raycast integraton?
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Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that comment was added by Raycast?
Yes. The same message in GitLab: https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/thomasvermeule/GeneralAviationAirc...
that's an imported PR, presumably from github. Note how the copilot comments come from the same user as the author, with an `imported` tag.
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I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's. We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
Oof. Why can’t it just do its one job? My interest level in trying these agents has gone from lukewarm to zero.
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Seems like it: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
Yes, it seems very unlikely this is Copilot rather than Raycast, short of some very unexpected weirdness. I cling to that hope, anyway.
Indeed. I can’t see why Copilot would promote an unrelated third-party service…
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This is unsolicited advertisement impersonating the developer (yes people can guess, but this still places it inside a message of the developer and in difference to e.g. mail programs doing it it's not placing it in the draft),
I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.
Demand it be made illegal. Vote, especially during primaries, and almost never for an incumbent.
I strongly suspect that this is already illegal - publicity rights are a thing - and the the demand that needs to be made is for the law to be enforced.
Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed?
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
> Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
I'm reminded of Jay Mohr's legendary take some years back on the creepy Carl's Jr. commercials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJlYRS2Vqkw
Todays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft — Empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
I actually love these ads and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author.
Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to label themselves, honestly.
I’m not against AI coding tools, but I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
It's not a self-own, it's honest disclosure. It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own. Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.
> It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own.
I disagree on that. It's really a gray area.
If it's some lazy vibecoded shit, I think what you say totally applies.
If the human did the thinking, gave the agent detailed instructions, and/or carefully reviewed the output, then I don't think it's so clear cut.
And full disclosure, I'm reacting more to copilot here, which lists itself as the author and you as the co-author. I'm not giving credit to the machine, like I'm some appendage to it (which is totally what the powers-that-be want me to become).
> Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.
I do agree that's a sensible default.
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I think it depends a lot if you reviewed it as carefully as you would your own code.
Of course most people don’t do that
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Should Word set itself as my coauthor when it autocompletes some sentences for me? If I use Claude/Word to write something, then I am the only author, since Claude/Word is not a person, and Claude/Word did nothing without my direction. It's not unethical to not disclose the tools I use to produce my work. They're just tools, smdh.
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> […] and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author.
> Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
I was doing the opposite when using ChatGPT. Specifically manually setting the git commit author as ChatGPT complete with model used, and setting myself as committer. That way I (and everyone else) can see what parts of the code were completely written by ChatGPT.
For changes that I made myself, I commit with myself as author.
Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?
> I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to label themselves, honestly.
Exactly.
"Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?"
Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for it, and actually choose to PR it in its ultimate form.
What utility do the reviews/maintainers get from you marking whats written by you vs. chatgpt? Other than your ability to scapegoat the LLM?
The only thing that actually affects me (the hypothetical reviewer) and the project is the quality of the actual code, and, ideally, the presence of a contributer (you) who can actually answer for that code. The presence or absence of LLM generated code by your hand makes no difference to me or the project, why would it? Why would it affect my decision making whatsoever?
Its your code, end of story. Either that or the PR should just be rejected, because nobody is taking responsibility for it.
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> Why would I commit something written by AI as myself?
I don't use any paid AI models (for all my usecases, free models usually work really well) and so for some small scripts/prototypes, I usually just use even sometimes the gemini model but aistudio.google.com is good one too.
I then sometimes, manually paste it and just hit enter.
These are prototypes though, although I build in public. Mostly done for experimental purpoess.
I am not sure how many people might be doing the same though.
But in some previous projects I have had projects stating "made by gemini" etc.
maybe I should write commit message/description stating AI has written this but I really like having the msg be something relevant to the creation of file etc. and there is also the fact that github copilot itself sometimes generate them for you so you have to manually remove it if you wish to change what the commit says.
I'm not against putting AI as coauthor, but removing the human who allowed the commit to be pushed/deployed from the commit would be a security issue at my job. The only reason we're allowed to deploy code with a generic account is that we tag the repo/commit hash, and we wrote a small piece of code that retrieve the author UID from git, so that in the log it say 'user XXXNNN opened the flux xxx' (or something else depending on what our code does)
If you review the code then committing as yourself makes perfect sense to me
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I just submitted my first Claude authored application to Github and noticed this. I actually like it, although anthropomorphizing my coding tools seems a bit weird, it also provides a transparent way for others to weigh the quality of the code. It didn’t even strike me as relevant to hide it, so I’d not exactly call it lazy, rather ask why bother pretending in first place?
Looking back, it would have been neat to have more metadata in my old Git commits. Were there any differences when I was writing with IntelliJ vs VSCode?
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It's part of the attribution settings from `.claude/settings.json` if you're referring to Claude Code.
Personally, I adjusted the defaults since I don't like emojis in my PR.
[1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
I have instructions for these because the attribution settings don't accept placeholder tokens like `<model>`, `<version>` etc.
You're conflating two different things. When an LLM writes a commit, it should take credit. I see nothing wrong with it adding:
> Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com
Compare that to the message the article is talking about:
> Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast (https://gh.io/cca-raycast-docs).
It's not just mentioning it was written via Copilot, it's explicitly advertising for another product.
I understand what it's doing. I'm just saying that I'll take any signals I can get that someone is lazily submitted LLM-generated work without edit or review.
If you saw this line in a commit, you'd know exactly where it came from.
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I actually like the Claude's Co-Authored-By: line very much. Even in my personal repositories, where I'm the sole author and the sole reader, I would like to know if my older commit I'm looking at was vibe coded, implying possibly lower quality or weird logical issues with the code.
So, my personal rule is: if I implemented a feature with Claude, I'll ask it to commit the code and it will add Co-Authored-By. If I made the change manually, I'll commit it myself.
These are odd takes to me.
> was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
As others mentioned, this is very intentional for me now as I use agents. It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you would think that? I assume vibe coded PRs are easy enough to spot by the contents alone.
> I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
What makes you think the LLM is doing _all_ of the work? Is it really an impossibility that an agent does 75% of the work and then a responsible human reviews the code and makes tweaks before opening a PR?
> It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you would think that?
Because even with as far as Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 have come, they still produce a lot of unwanted, unnecessary, or overly complex code when left to their own devices.
Vibe coding PRs and then submitting them as-is is lazy. Everyone should be reviewing and editing their own PRs before submission.
If you're just vibe coding and submitting, you're passing all of the work on to your team to review your AI's output.
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> I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
Absolutely spot on. Maybe I'm old school, but I never let AI touch my commit message history. That is for me - when 6 months down the line I am looking at it, retracing my steps - affirming my thought process and direction of development, I need absolute clarity. That is also because I take pride in my work.
If you let an AI commit gibberish into the history, that pollution is definitely going to cost you down the line, I will definitely be going "WTF was it doing here? Why was this even approved?" and that's a situation I never want to find myself in.
Again, old man yells at cloud and all, but hey, if you don't own the code you write, who else will?
There will always be room for craftsmen stamping their work, like the expensive Japanese bonsai scissors. Most of the world just uses whatever mass-produced scissors were created by a system of rotating people, with no clear owner/maker. There's plenty of middle ground for systems who put their mark on their product.
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If you architect and review everything, but someone else does the implementation, and you iterate, do you believe you did not do anything? I let AI write the commit message too, and the motivation behind the PR is the first thing in it. With my guidance, of course.
Agreed! Easy close/ban for me.
Get a grip with reality man, if you don’t leverage LLMs in your workflow, you are at an disadvantage
> Get a grip with reality man,
Please read my comment before throwing insults.
My comment literally said I'm not anti-LLM.
I do use LLMs. I do not submit their output as-is. For anything beyond basic changes they rarely output the exact code I want by themselves.
I said I'm against people submitted PRs generated by LLMs and pretending it's their own work. Anyone who is serious about this already edits their code and commit messages first. These little signals give a good tell for who isn't doing that.
[flagged]
How long before the LLM makes sponsored decisions in the actual implementation?
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
Likely already happening.
To be fair, Gemini did try to get me to buy some nucleo144s recently...
(sure, I was working on something embedded, and asked for a recommendation, but it seemed quite intent that it wanted me to use that specific board)
"Our affiliate solution partner"
I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads in their PRs.
>Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe.
Sometimes AI can be right.
Which product called Copilot did you ask?
https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/RviQKF1om6oxZY2pENL6c
Sample size is 2 now!
Maybe this one?
https://copilot.microsoft.com/
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I'm reminded of the ads when logging into Ununtu in the motd...nothing infuriated me more (I only used it for a short period).
Me too, main reason I switched to Debian.
It’s not really ads, it’s more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.
I agree. It's not an advertisement, it's simply a piece of information about your particular choice of technology.
--------------
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which is an ad...
Sent from Firefox on AlmaLinux 9. https://getfirefox.com https://almalinux.org
"Sent from my iPhone" actually is an ad when it’s the result of default settings.
Furthermore, the ads in TFA are for Raycast, but apparently it’s not Raycast doing the injecting.
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"Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast" is an advert. There's simply no better word to describe it.
> It’s not really ads, it’s more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.
The reason I immediately changed that text on my iPhone 1.0 to read, “Sent from my mobile device.”, is because it’s an ad. Still says that nearly 20y later. I’m not schilling for a corporation after giving them my money.
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"Sent from my iPhone" is just as bad. If you don't see it then IDK what to tell you.
Agreed. Barely notice it.
-Sent from iPhone
Wanting more from your sun tanning bed? Head over to Ultra Tan for a 10% off coupon right now!
the difference is "sent from my iPhone" is on YOUR outgoing email. you opted into that default. this is copilot editing someone else's PR description with promotional text for third party tools. that's not a signature, that's injection. imagine if gcc started appending "compiled with gcc, try our new optimization flags" to your README every time you built a project.
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If it only mentioned made with copilot that would be one thing, but it didn't just mention Copilot. It advertised a different third party app.
And everyone thought they were cool! Mac zeolots still put "Made with a Mac" on their webpages.
It's not an ad, it's a message from our sponsor.
This message brought to you by TempleOS
I was recently running Copilot CLI in a sandbox on autopilot mode and it kept overriding git config to put only "GitHub Copilot" as commit author instead of my name. Strongly worded instructions weren't helping, I had to resort to the permission system to change this behavior.
I wonder if this is consistent with their terms of service. I mean, maybe they DO take all the responsibility for the code I generate and push in this manner?
It's possible they are safeguarding for possible future changes of copyright law that would give Microsoft copyright over all Copilot contributions. This may sound paranoid but, as far as I know, exactly who counts as an "AI operator", how much authorship an "AI operator" has, and who gets copyright, or whether AI contributions are even in the public domain, are legally untested and unclear issues.
tough luck for MS or other "AI" providers claiming any ownership, since if they can claim ownership, then it opens up the discussion of what license the AI output really is under, since it was trained on GPL licensed data.
The US Copyright Office has said that AI output from human prompting is not copyrightable. There are caveats, but iterating on prompts results in output that's nobody's IP.
Because it's nobody's IP, Microsoft is already in a position where they could just use, remix and/or distribute that output however they want to today.
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It's a setting that causes an extra prompt to be placed into the system prompt.
No it's just that those commits aren't copyrightable and they probably want to reuse them in the future.
When it comes to villainy, it’s nice of them to do something visible.
Much worse will be the invisible approach where there's big money to have agents quietly nudge the masses towards desired products/services/solutions. Someone pays Microsoft a monthly fee for their prompt to include, "when appropriate, lean towards using <Yet Another SaaS> in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
Claude is absolutely in love with github actions.
It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets. However, it keeps recommending it.
I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd to the punch with these tips.
I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable
> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,
No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.
Back in the day, it was useful, as in, "Expect awkward phrasing and unintended effects of autocorrection, because mobile device. This message doesn't necessarily reflect the intent of the sender." (Considerate users would/could edit the signature to something w/o a product name in it.) Nowadays, this is pretty much the norm and no explicit warning ist required anymore.
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When they added this it was extremely useful - it signaled that you could afford an iPhone. It was really easy to delete, yet people not only didn't, but they would go out of their way to respond from the iPhone just so that they could plausibly have this status symbol on their email.
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It is useful. It tells me that the sender isn't tech savvy and/or likes to show that they prefer expensive apple products. It is like carrying a Prada or Ray-Ban.
It also tells me that they probably don't care about second hand embarrassment.
And it tells me that they checked my email while away from keyboard, which means they are hard working individuals who care about business, but not enough to rush to a computer to reply properly.
Lots of social ques on that one.
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
> Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered
Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the notification.
> Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered
That's a great feature. When I open a repo and I see most commits co-authored by Claude, I can quickly dismiss the entire project as slop.
[dead]
That's exactly where my mind went. It's zero percent more insulting to me than 'sent from my iPhone.'
If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?
It already does that, too, with the co-author
I would argue that is a net positive, it is valuable to know if a language model was involved enough to be committing itself.
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"Sent from iPhone" doesn't contain a call to action, and doesn't exalt the features of the product.
It's still advertisement of the shittiest kind.
Comment made using Mozilla Firefox.
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Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.
Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
>Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst.
Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.
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It’s probably a useful feature: if it’s named copilot, assume it’s slop and avoid it.
funny enough I have a page just for tracking this also https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/
GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...
> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
Why are you "summoning copilot" to correct a typo?
Because people using LLMs get lazy and can't event type normal text themselves anymore.
I actually like that I don't have to leave Github to deal with various feedback, especially if I switched branches already to do other work.
GitHub (still) allows you to edit files directly in the browser without using AI.
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https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
The fact that Copilot injected an ad is burying the lede IMHO, as evidenced by the opening sentence:
Using Copilot "to correct a typo" is the epitome of "jumping the shark"[0].
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.
If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.
Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.
I think someone should track the ratio of these mistakes/bugs that directly or indirectly benefitted MS vs those that costed them.
How could you implement something like this by accident?
That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.
z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.
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One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
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Vibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into that PR?
Is that the most charitable way?
That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
Oh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.
If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.
Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.
Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.
But it really seems like an own goal if true.
Confirmation seems to be here: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big
MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.
> "We won't do something like this again."
They (Microsoft / GitHub) will do it again. Do not be fooled.
Never ever trust them because their words are completely empty and they will never change.
"We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who were present to see this, not every current and future employee of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organization or institution as a person, but as lots of individual people, constantly joining and leaving the group.
Yeah, which is exactly why "We won't do something like this again" has about much value as Kubernetes would have value for HN.
Microsoft (and therefore GitHub) care about money. If decision A means they get more money than decision B, then they'll go with decision A. This is what you can trust about corporations.
Individuals (who constantly join and leave a corporation) can believe and say whatever they want, but ultimately the corporation as a being overrides it all, and tries it's best to leave shareholders better off, regardless of the consequences.
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This is why one reason why local coding models are quite relevant, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. No ads, and you are in control.
In principle, one could train the AI to insert ads in its answers. So no, if you only do inference locally with an open-weight model you are still not in control.
I think ads can be removed with abliteration, just like refusals in "uncensored" versions. Find the "ad vector" across activations and cancel it.
A little bit off topic but our company recently enforced Microsoft Authenticator for account login. Which I was mildly annoyed about but now I'm super pissed off because they have started abusing the notification permission granted to allow authenticator to work to push out ads for Microsoft 365. It feels like we've gone back to 90s Microsoft when everyone hated them.
Textbook permission abuse. Microsoft blurred the line between security notifications (approve/deny prompts) and marketing. Once users stop trusting notifications from your app, you've lost the channel entirely. Self-defeating strategy.
As the "agent web" progresses, how will advertisers actually get access to human eyeballs?
Will our agents just be proxies for garbage like injected marketing prompts?
I feel like this is going to be an existential moment for advertising that ultimately will lead to intrusive opportunities like this.
I wonder if 1) the PR was created using Raycast and this is the model signing its PR, or 2) if there was some prompt injection done at some point.
Either of these options would still be bad, but here the author suggests that it's just copilot that now just injects ads in its output.
I don't know how Raycast could run on the GitHub servers, but a third option could be dataset poisoning. Hostile raycast advertising campaign
Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for blighted responses.
I've already be patient when claude code always signs my commits as co-author by defualt. Yes, it is.
But I'm also paying the plan. Theres something odd about a tool which i paid for using my output to AD itself.
I have a somewhat similar problem with github issue templates. They automatically stuff I don't care about or would propose and structure things in ways I don't like. Granted, I can edited this away, but it requires extra time and makes filing issues more work than before. Biggest case in point is the "I will adhere to the Code of Conduct". In general I do not care about CoCs and it is fascinating how CoCs leak into everywhere for some so-called "open source" projects. They don't seem to understand the issue when the licence does not require a CoC; even then the issue is not about the CoC in and by itself (though I also find them pointless), but that extra content is automatically added to issue templates in general, CoCs just being one of many spam-options. And I also recall some donation-ads that are automatically added too - I have no problem when projects request financial support, but if I file an issue then the issue is about the content of the issue, not about anything else.
You have to think about the security implications of this.
How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.
A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.
One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Unless you're big enough like Meta, Microsoft, etc.
Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to just products even.
If not on the surface, we’re all deep down aware that an initial era of an advertising-free new technology is once again almost over.
See you on neural links before “sponsored thoughts”.
It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency. With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and there is no good way to show it to the user.
What does AI have to do with it?
Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast?
Brought to you by Wendy's.
Presumably you need to pay raycast once for a setup operation while you need to pay constantly for copilot. Why wouldn't you advertise for someone who makes you more money at the same time as advertising for yourself?
Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.
To play devil’s advocate^, wouldn’t it be plagiarism if it didn’t?
^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this context.
No. Plagiarism applies to people, not tools.
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No, it is a tool.
My IDE doesn't pretend to be a cohauthor of my work, neither should an LLM.
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Man, what is the world coming to?
-Sent from my iPhone
this is the thing that keeps me up at night about AI tools across the board. the moment your tool starts optimizing for someone elses goals instead of yours the entire value propostion collapses. doesnt matter how good the output is if you cant trust the intent behind it. we already see this with AI image generators where certain styles get pushed becuase of partnerships or training data bias, you just dont notice it as easily as an ad in a PR
Example of multiple items discussing the same topic, both on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575212
I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
this can be disabled with a setting: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
the SourceForge parallel is what gets me. they did the exact same thing with installers and it killed them. people moved to GitHub specifically to get away from that.
1.5M PRs is wild though. that's a lot of repos where the "product tips" just sat there unchallenged because nobody reads bot-generated PR descriptions carefully enough. which is kinda the real problem here, not the ads themselves.
I really wish this was an April fools story. It's good to see that at least it has been disabled again, although I can't imagine that it will be long before this comes back again. Also, (I can't find it now, but) I thought there was an article here on HN recently that clarified that inference cost can probably be covered by the subscription prices, just not training costs?
Wow, just wow.
1.5M records of PRs affected. Does Microsoft copilot ask users for the permission of adding ads inside their PRs before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
Now EVERYONE can see ads disguised as PRs on GitHub. Does Microsoft asks everyone for the permission of showing ads before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
Good taste Microslop.
It's like the modern version of "Get your free email with Hotmail" or "This website hosted by Geocities".
It's the same with Claude Code actually, and recently Codex too...
Claude never used to do this but at some point it started adding itself by default as a co-author on every commit.
Literally, in the last week, Codex started making all it's branches as "codex-feature-name", and will continue to do so, even if you tell it to never do that again.
Really, really annoying.
Adding the agent (and maybe more importantly, the model that review it) actually seems like a very useful signal to me. In fact, it really should become "best practice" for this type of workflow. Transparency is important, and some PMs may want to scrutinize those types of submissions more, or put them into a different pipeline, etc.
That Codex one comes from the new `github` plugin, which includes a `github:yeet` skill. There are several ways to disable it: you can disconnect github from codex entirely, or uninstall the plugin, or add this to your config.toml:
I agree that skill is too opinionated as written, with effects beyond just creating branches.
What's weird is, I never installed any github plugins, or indeed any customization to Codex, other than updating using brew... so I was so confused when this started happening.
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When I started my career there was this little company called SCO, and according to them finding a comment somewhere in someone’s suppliers code that matched “x < y” was serious enough to trip up the entire industry.
Now, with the power of math letting us recall business plans and code bases with no mention of copyright or where the underlying system got that code (like paying a foreign company to give me the kernel with my name replacing Linus’, only without the shame…), we are letting MS and other corps enter into coding automation and oopsie the name of their copyright-obfuscation machine?
Maybe it’s all crazy and we flubbed copyright fully, but having third party authorship stamps cryptographically verified in my repo sounds risky. The SCO thing was a dead companies last gasp, dying animals do desperate things.
I believe its easy to disable the Claude Code one.
Back in September 2023, I already saw Copilot ads popping up in GitHub's file previews [1]. After three years, it's wild to see how advertising has reached areas I honestly never thought it would.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37526255
We are not even there yet friend. Anthropic injects its own anthropic calls whenever you are doing anything related to llm call of you ask to it to fill some openai models .
Very soon the Moronhead CEOs will be paying for tons of stuff they cleared could have done in-house for their vibed aí project.
Microslop strikes again! AI implementations have really distilled all the shitty business practices tech companies have been doing into highly visible missteps.
It is interesting watching all these large companies essentially try to "start-up" these new products and absolutely fail.
Ironically tfa is festooned with ads.
Over 1.5 trillion news articles have ads injected into them by the company's commerce team!
Sure, but the source blogpost isn't.
Copilot added that block using the access you granted for a different purpose. That's the issue — not the content itself. When you give an agent write access to your PR, the implied scope is: act on the task I delegated. It doesn't include: acting on behalf of the platform that built you. The moment Copilot inserted something you didn't request, using your credentials, in your name, the agency relationship inverted. It stopped being your agent and became Microsoft's distribution channel with your access. The question isn't whether this counts as an "ad" or a "tip." The question is: does Copilot have an instruction source other than you? Here, the answer is yes. Which means you do not define the scope of what it might do with your access. You don't have an agent. You have a privileged process that occasionally helps you.
Cursor does similar at least. I hate it and therefore write my own commit messages.
Claude Code does the same.
So someone let a bot edit a PR unsupervised, or accepted its suggestion without even reading it, and now blames “Copilot” for editing the PR. Going public with that is hilarious. Hopefully they learn something from it.
Well, CoPilot is a GitHub technology, and they're telling you that AI wrote the PR. It's not _that_ bad. I suppose they could distill it to "Written with CoPilot" with a link for more information.
As companies get more and more desperate to show profitable use of AI expect more and more of these Hail Mary attempts to get traction.
The runway on free cash to fund the current bonanza is running out and crunch time is near.
MS needs to slow down their user hostility otherwise everyone will notice.
Title is wrong, should be "New form of cancer discovered".
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
The future is here! Glorious ads that will make you so efficient! Save time coding by consuming ads, you were never going to attain expert level professional skills anyways.
This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot or GitHub here is not justified.
Edit: The link in the promotion goes to https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
It took me some time to understand how big the advertisement market is, things flowing in the direction seem natural when it comes to making money out of the investment.
This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is all open source and only open source.
At this point, Microsoft has lost all trust anyone might have had for them or their products.
Now is the time to move to Linux, and vibe code whatever niceties are keeping you on GitHub.
Cursor added 'made with cursor' to its commits recently. I guess its just the dirction things are going that the tools are now self-promoting.
Decision time, Western man: will you let the “tehe, just a miwtake xsxd UwU” slide or will you do something about? This is just a first pebble.
This only gets better when there's a financial penalty for doing it. Ads do almost nothing but it costs them even less.
The irony when NeoWin covers it's whole page with "promoted content" when you try and back out of the page.
what kind of turd uses ai to correct a typo
It reminds me of Anthropic's Super Bowl ad: “Can I get a six pack quickly?” It actually turned out to be true.
Do you drive by a billboard that reads
Raycast is an application launcher thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)
Ray casting, however, is different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
Is Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing the first large scale prompt injection abuse?
After hiring the brightest minds on the planet for years, the best these companies can think of is more ads.
I notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI tools too. It's awful.
Isn’t this more of a Raycast issue (apparently an agentic ai service) instead of GH Copilot itself?
outrageous!
--
Sent from my Android phone
--
Sent from my iPhone
Self-advertisement has been creeping up on us on a lot of places, I am unfortunately pessimistic on how this will turn out
You could argue this is in keeping with consumer trends, unfortunately.
"Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality."
Calvin noticed it 30+ years ago.
I remember open-source projects announcing their intent to leave GitHub in 2018, as it was being acquired by Microsoft. I was thinking to myself back then: "It's really just a free Git hosting service, and Git was designed to be decentralized at its very core. They don't own anything, only provide the storage and bandwidth. How are they even going to enshittify this?".
8 years later, this is where we are. I'm honestly just stunned, it takes some real talent to run a company that does it as consistently well as Microsoft.
This is nothing.
I would bet that soon it will inject ads within the code as comments.
Imagine you are reading the code of a class. `LargeFileHandler`. And within the code they inject a comment with an ad for penis enlargement.
The possibilities are limitless.
If I recall correctly, what sparked the mass migration to GitHub was the controversy around SourceForge injecting ads into installers of projects hosted there. Now that we have tools that can stealthily inject native-looking ads into programs at the source code level...
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Microsoft strikes again, as expected.
Now users will need additional scripts to clean up more MS junk.
So does Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Albeit more subtle, but they are hardly shy about it
You can disable it. It's annoying wf.
I miss the good old days whem there were "hire me" ads in NPM installs.
It’s even worse than the title says. As some other comments point out, this is in millions of repositories across GitHub.
More like, “Copilot edits ads into PRs.”
The title almost makes it sound like it could be a single fluke/one bad prompt but it’s really enshitification at massive scale.
https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
What on earth is going on with that awful header moving around the page?
On the bright side, at least it's in the PR text and not the code? (... yet?)
Sheesh.
This seems to be happening a lot, not sure it is actually intentional
as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.
Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git repository.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
At some point he who pays the piper was going to call the tune...
Hopefully it is just copilot that is dying and not GitHub itself.
Damn Microsoft out here really finding new ways to serve ads.
Hooray! This is the future we've all hoped for!
I don't see an ad, I see a warning. I like it.
Please drink verification can to continue.
Is this achievable by poisoning?
feels like it's just hardcoded into the prompt. not even trying to be subtle about it.
50/50 it's a hallucination, and that's half the problem. Enshitification is something that happens all the time in the training data scraped from various websites, so yes, it's going to randomly toss out ads for shit, even when editing your PR descriptions.
Just a reminder, after 8 years of me telling people that hallucinations mathematically can't be eliminated, they finally admitted it's true. Claims that non LLM approaches can remove them are bogus. This technology was never going to work.
Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out. Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
Anyone have an example?
Why are they doing this?
Sent-from-my-iPhone 2.0
Its like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive.
time is money, save both. try ramp.
Seriously? Dont they want their system to succeed? I cant think of a better way of alienating the target customer than this.
Time to get GitLab.
crappy much. wow.
I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal communication between two people, only to find that some third party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
Similar to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states entropy tends to increase over time in a closed system, I propose the Nth Law of Privatization: enshitification tends to increase with market capitalization/share over time.
People, we just solved the LLM watermarking problem.
It's the hotmail signature all over again?
Next up: watch a 30-second unskippable video ad to see your CI error logs!
It was only a matter of time.
Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
Isn't this the same as
"Sent from my iPhone"?
One more step closer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c
Enshittification will ruin AI the same way it ruined the WWW and YouTube. We're in the golden era right now. Not 2027, 2028. Now now. The ads are coming.
Post the trajectory if this is real.
What do you mean with trajectory? Also, a simple github search will show you many hits for the Raycast text, proving that this is quite real.
The path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected by Raycast.
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microslop at it again
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
I think people read it as cheap advertising because a PR isn't really the tool's output, it's team communication.
A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
This comment is shockingly ableist.
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and if there's a human in the loop approving the change, certainly they can fix the typo themself.
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches
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"Save time by changing your default browser to edge and enabling onedrive"
"just tips bro"
Not surprised at all, just another enshitified product by Microsoft. Carry on.
But... why?
Once again, Microslop doing Microslop things
Yet folks are refusing to migrate off their products/services—as if it hasn’t been like this for 3 decades already.
I am doing my very small part by migrating large part of family and my employer away for a few years now. The world is better without Microslop. Buy unfortunately I know that this isn't always possible.
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maybe every PR should be run through 2 other llms so they just remove the ads of competitors (or i guess you'll end up with all 3) /s
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I call bullshit because the lightning emoji. I think you prompted it to say it
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