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Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features
- scuff3d 1y agoI'm all for getting away from GitHub, but Codeberg is a terrible name. Sounds like it's owned by Scrooge McDuck.
- LtWorf 1y agoI went to https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/
- crabmusket 1y agoI just became a donor :)
- LtWorf 1y agoMe too, but they host my stuff.
- benrutter 1y agoMe too! I absolutely love it as a project, but I do miss finding and seeing the development of prihects I'm interested in there. Any tips for finding other interesting codeberg hosted projects?
- chanux 1y agoI also brought a couple of projects there. However I'm not sure if AI crawlers are staying away from it. Also, I remember there was Radicle https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz Any Radicle users?
- RossBencina 1y agoctrl+shift+p > Chat: Hide AI Features in vscode
- trimethylpurine 1y agoThank you for sharing solutions.
- Y_Y 1y agoHow on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
- Spooky23 1y agoHow on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
- diggan 1y agoThey used Emojis and printed "Microsoft <3 Open Source" on posters for conferences, so clearly they really had changed...
- reaperducer 1y agoHow on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time? There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum. They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end. I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
- Spooky23 1y agoEnd of the day, PR works. Even in peak “friendly” Microsoft, they were hard nosed and noxious to negotiate with.
- airstrike 1y agoThere is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. And git lives on regardless of GitHub
- latexr 1y ago> There is no law against that Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.
- IshKebab 1y agoIs this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and > the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories. but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it. I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copilot` user but I looked at this users repos and their most popular one has a total of 3 PRs with no Copilot ones. I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs.
- madeofpalk 1y agoAs a paid/commercial OSS maintainer, I haven't seen this from the public either. People occasionally submit low-effort PRs or issues, probably from Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, but I don't feel to bothered dealing with them. Of course, I'm fortunate enough to be paid for this. I think it's just an unfortunate fact now in 2025 that if you look after a text box online, you're going to have to deal with AI sludge in one way or another. If you don't want to do that, close the text box.
- flykespice 1y ago> Is this actually a real problem? I mean if Microsoft is "training" on your source code without consent (and potentially violating licenses) , that is a huge problem. > I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs How do you asess whether some PR was made by an AI(like the user did)?
- IshKebab 1y ago> training Not what this is about. > How do you asess whether some PR was made by an AI(like the user did)? Searched for PRs authored by copilot or mentioning copilot.
- flykespice 1y ago> Searched for PRs authored by copilot or mentioning copilot. So Github copilot forces your PR to tag them as coauthored by Copilot or users can be slick without mentioning it?
- ants_everywhere 1y agoPeople have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now. And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source. This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one. Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
- gchamonlive 1y agoEven though you are right, that misses the point terribly. It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform. Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community. It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.
- layer8 1y agoWhile Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place. As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.
- gchamonlive 1y agoYeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point. Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption. > I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this can be tracked back to every individual while they collaborate and make connections while they contribute to each other. How is this not a community?
- hparadiz 1y agoI recently got access to the premium version through work and was able to prototype something super legit in a language I don't really code in. It requires a heavy understanding of Linux and I had to rephrase my prompts in a "high level" way. However the result would have taken weeks and I was able to do it in a few days. That said I would have a hard time justifying paying for it for my personal life because it's really that expensive. I look forward to 10 years from now when the local ML is good enough or free.
- WhyNotHugo 1y ago> During Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users. Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric. I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users. I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
- dmd 1y agoGLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
- hodgesrm 1y agoAh, one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare quotes. Another is: "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!“ My father used it frequently when we were kids. I found out decades later it was a quote from King Lear.
- stefan_ 1y agoI don't think they tell the guy it's forced. They are at Soviet army levels of reporting, that's why you got people adding telemetry and copilot to Editor.
- bflesch 1y agoI agree. For years we had to read HN posts about why we should not use vanity metrics but now that the corporate tech bros are making money with AI head over fist the user count is the most important metric again.
- zahlman 1y ago> I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I don't; any ideas what's different?
- daemin 1y agoI read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason. As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to. I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised. I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.
- latexr 1y ago> and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason. The “whatever reason” can be to build a portfolio to apply for jobs. Or worse, to more quickly build trust to exploit vulnerable projects. https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/04/why-powerful-but-hard-to-detect-backdoors-could-become-a-routine-problem-for-open-source-projects-because-of-ai/ https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/04/why-powerful-but-hard-to...
- the__alchemist 1y agoSame experience. Does anyone have info on this discrepancy in observations?
- daemin 1y agoI read this article after it was shared on social media by the Codeberg.org account so I though it was a PR piece, as it doesn't mention self hosting at all, just moving to another hosted platform.
- TiredOfLife 1y agoThe article is by theregister.com. Basically The Onion of tech media
- bgwalter 1y agoCorporate overreach like this happens if most open source developers no longer speak up because they want to be hired or retain their positions. They delude themselves if they think that attitude provides them any security. The opposite is the case: corporations will use the sycophants, secretly laugh about them and fire them if they have served their purpose. As in the case of the Google and Microsoft firings of Python core developers.
- user214412412 1y agocant wait for the forced teams integration
- AlexandrB 1y agoI find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.
- tho2342o349423 1y agoAt this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% pa. - that's just insanely high for what is supposed to be a stable developed economy.
- chubot 1y agoThey probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago. Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit. In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from (on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.) [1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.
- djoldman 1y ago> The second most popular discussion – where popularity is measured in upvotes – is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews. From the discussion: > Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories > ... This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct¹. > Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature. How does one see that a user, e.g. "chickenpants" submitted an issue or PR that was generated by "Copilot"? Isn't there only one creator?
- fatchan 1y agoGithub is my push --mirror location, nothing more. Main is a popular Gitlab instance gitgud.io, and I host my own secondary mirror. Gitlab is of course adding more AI and corpo garbage, and once they prevent disabling these "features" on community editions we'll see a fork of gitlab, probably. The assertion that github is some bustling hub of opportunity is a strange one. At best you get people more likely to contribute because they already signed up, and a contribution from somebody not willing to sign up to another free service or simply email you an issue report is a contribution worth missing.
- skydhash 1y agoI think it’s mostly people around the JS/Go/Rust ecosystems that tend to be vocal about GitHub being a community. For a lot of projects I couldn’t care less if it was just cgit or gitea. It’s quite easy to setup git to send patch via email. And you can always use a pastebin to host the diff if you’re sharing ideas. Bit I guess that’s not as visible as the GitHub dashboard.
- clickety_clack 1y agoYep, the headline on the Gitlab landing page is now “Build software, not toolchains. With native AI at every step.” I’d love to find a stripped down solution that focused on hosting code repos. I don’t think GitHub see it as their core business anymore.
- api 1y agoWhat is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats? It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this. Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tireless junior intern who had memorized the entire Internet is actually useful.
- Traubenfuchs 1y agoNot old enough for MongoDB? Big Data?
- marginalia_nu 1y agoKPIs are likely the missing part of the puzzle. CEO wants AI engagement to go up, organization makes AI engagement go up. If users don't want to engage with new AI features, the new AI features become unavoidable so that engagement goes up despite user preferences. KPIs are a fantastic way for an organization to lose any touch with reality and can drive some truly bizarre decision-making.
- api 1y agoAhh, the reason we lost the Vietnam war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- benrutter 1y agoTangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars. They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges. I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between github/gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut/gitea is near identical.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoI think it's a lot harder of an OSS project not hosted on GitHub to find contributors and gain traction in general. Network effect, as always.
- pornel 1y agoIt depends where your contributors are coming from. For example for Rust, the crates index is the discovery mechanism. Contributors will come to your repo by whatever link you put in your package's metadata. I've split my Rust packages between GitHub and GitLab and don't see a difference in participation.
- LtWorf 1y agoIt's the way I want it to be honest. Keeps the low effort garbage away for the moment.
- IshKebab 1y agoIt's one factor but I think they have more important "secret weapons": 1. Network effects; people already have an account. 2. Free CI, especially free Mac and Windows CI.
- wiether 1y agoYou can add two more things: - 2000 minutes of free compute time with GitHub Actions - free Docker Hub alternative with unlimited pulling (they say that you're limited to 500Mb but I currently have probably +20Gb of images on my Free account) They have the community aspect AND the freebies
- 3np 1y agoI've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user. They keep closing the ticket and saying it's "with the engineering team". I keep reopening and asking for resolution, escalation, or progress. GitHub did have working and professional support in the past but in 2025 they are just malicious. It's surreal.
- progval 1y agoDo you have an example of "inlined JSON on github.com pages"? I can't imagine what this looks like.
- 3np 1y agoNot near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.
- YJfcboaDaJRDw 1y ago[dead]
- 63stack 1y agoNot sure why this is downvoted, I just checked and I do see a json object inside a <script type="application/json" id="client-env"> tag, that has all kinds of copilot related keys. I checked my profile and copilot is enabled with a "lock" icon, I cannot disable it. I have never enabled it.
- e40 1y agoPlease point to the ticket so we can add to your voice.
- crote 1y agoI'm getting quite sick of how it is forced on you. It's not just yet-another useful feature, they are shoveling it into everything, and giving it the most prominent place possible. I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console. A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
- throwaway94876 1y agoJust put anybody who PRs AI slop to any repo on a big, collaborative blocklist so we can all block them and move on with our lives. They would be PRing AI slop with or without Copilot integrations anyway.
- zzzeek 1y agocan someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos? it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
- Leynos 1y agoI suspect it's either fantasy or fabrication.
- trimethylpurine 1y agoIs it on by default for end user repos? It appears to be disabled by default for organizations. In the organization: Organization -> Settings -> Copilot -> Access... Turn it off.
- FredPret 1y agoI’m a soon-to-be-ex-VSCode user, but seeing the long march of Copilot (Clippy 2.0, except it steals my code) at Github and now VSCode, I’m taking the plunge and learning Emacs.
- rdm_blackhole 1y agoI am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow. On bigger PRs, I regularly have diffs that take seconds to load. The actions also started hanging a lot more often and will run for 30 minutes stuck in some kind of loop unless they time out or I cancel them manually. This did not use to happen before or least not as frequently as now. Finally when I try to cancel the hung actions, the cancel button never gets disabled after I click it and it is possible to click it multiple times without any effect. Once clicked, surely it shouldn't be possible to click it again unless the API calls failed. Clearly there is a quality decrease happening here.
- rsynnott 1y ago> I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow. Making things work properly is terribly passé in this brave new world of magic nonsense-generating robots. You see this with Google Docs, too; after about a decade of stagnation, Google _finally_ started adding a few features (basic Markdown support, say, better comments, a few other bits and pieces) around 2022... And it finally got a bit less slow. But now that seems to have come to a shuddering halt; once more Docs stagnates, but it has about a hundred Gemini buttons now! It also feels like it's getting slower and buggier again.
- chris_wot 1y agoThis is very interesting... I've just learned about Codeberg. Does anyone have any info on it?
- knowitnone2 1y agoisn't this typical Microsoft behavior? Just look at Windows and how many components are forced upon you. Try uninstalling it, it just comes right back. Most of it, you can't even uninstall. Some you can't even unpin. That's a monopoly for you. And they steal your documents by making OneDrive the default so they can train their AI. It's malicious.
- agilob 1y agoFor me Copilot keeps commenting something like "this changes typo in a documentation". The comment is now blocking automerge of the PR, so I have more work. I have to go to the PR and mark the comment as resolved. Thanks AI, thanks Microsoft, fantastic job burning electricity for this. At least Bitcoin created some value ;)
- danny_codes 1y agolol bitcoin has not created any value. Well it has if you are a scammer or drug dealer I suppose.
- daveguy 1y agoJust wait until people realize how little value Bitcoin has when people rush to the exits. Limited number of transactions, limited utility for the average person. We haven't had runs on banks in a long time in the US because of regulation. Crypto is a wild west. There will eventually be a Bitcoin exit trigger event and it will be brutal.
- adithyassekhar 1y agoI love GitHub copilot.
- monegator 1y agoHear me here for a second: what if... what if, on every single bot post people just commented for the bot to go and suck a big fat.. you know what And then lock the conversation maybe the bot would learn something, eventually? Sometimes i wonder why this hasn't happened anyway: Internet's not what it used to be. And maybe companies would eventually take a clue, after they banned all actual contributors for having foul fingers (very unlikely i know) thanks for attending my ted talk
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- darepublic 1y agoSeriously just screw Microsoft. Screw their ceo. Blatant parasites
- kogasa240p 1y agoMove to alternatives then, it won't be easy but it'll be worth it.
- datavirtue 1y agoThese anti-agentic coding nut jobs are going to get themselves thrown out of the industry. STFU, some of us are working.
- techbrovanguard 1y agowhat “work” are you doing, you parasitic hack?
- tech234a 1y agoI found the Copilot-generated commit message suggestions distracting when editing files from the web, so I made a uBlock Origin filter to block this feature: ||api.individual.githubcopilot.com/agents/github-commit-message-generation$xhr,domain=github.com