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Copilot edited an ad into my PR
- simonw 7mo agoWhich Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.
- SchemaLoad 7mo agoMicrosoft 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.
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoIt’s probably a useful feature: if it’s named copilot, assume it’s slop and avoid it.
- protocolture 7mo ago>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.
- ValentineC 7mo ago"Microsoft Remote Desktop" was such a good and distinct name. RIP.
- pavo-etc 7mo agofunny enough I have a page just for tracking this also https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/ https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/
- nialse 7mo agoMicrosoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed? Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
- longislandguido 7mo ago> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJlYRS2Vqkw
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- blitzar 7mo agoTodays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft — Empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
- dinakernel 7mo agoSeriously? Dont they want their system to succeed? I cant think of a better way of alienating the target customer than this.
- daemin 7mo agoUsing 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.
- LeoPanthera 7mo agoThis comment is shockingly ableist.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- onion2k 7mo agoUsing 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.
- pabrams 7mo agoThat 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ex-aws-dude 7mo agoSounds 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
- hexasquid 7mo agoI'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 ...
- pants2 7mo agoWas Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast? Brought to you by Wendy's.
- efreak 7mo agoPresumably 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?
- WD-42 7mo agoWhy 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?
- oefrha 7mo agoIf 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-copilot-coding-agent-from-raycast/ https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-17-assign-issues-to-co...
- MattGaiser 7mo agoIt could simply be something in the Raycast integraton?
- oefrha 7mo agoI said it’s more believable than GitHub randomly advertising a non-GitHub product (my initial read of the situation, which seemed highly unlikely).
- 7mo ago
- with 7mo agoEveryone 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?
- annie511266728 7mo agoI 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.
- post_below 7mo agoAssuming 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.
- altairprime 7mo agoThat’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.
- Andrex 7mo agoOh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
- chrismorgan 7mo agoHow could you implement something like this by accident?
- bigyabai 7mo agoLLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.
- mathieudombrock 7mo agoLLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing. Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
- kortilla 7mo agoDistributed float math is not deterministic without introducing total operations ordering and destroying performance
- idkwhatimdoing2 7mo agoIts like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive. time is money, save both. try ramp.
- pabrams 7mo agoWhy are you "summoning copilot" to correct a typo?
- MattGaiser 7mo agoI 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.
- icar 7mo agohttps://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
- deredede 7mo agoGitHub (still) allows you to edit files directly in the browser without using AI.
- Andrex 7mo agoI've always wondered how many people know about this. As someone who had to persist on Chromebooks for a bit (before Linux support), it was a godsend for quick fixes.
- shafyy 7mo agoBecause people using LLMs get lazy and can't event type normal text themselves anymore.
- GN0515 7mo agoBut... why?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- pinkmuffinere 7mo agoI 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
- silisili 7mo agoThat'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?
- winrid 7mo agoIt already does that, too, with the co-author
- pavo-etc 7mo agoI would argue that is a net positive, it is valuable to know if a language model was involved enough to be committing itself.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo ago+1, it definitely changes the way I interact, and the amount of suspicion I would have for the code.
- computomatic 7mo agoI 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.
- marcus_holmes 7mo ago> Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the notification.
- turtleyacht 7mo agoDo you drive by a billboard that reads Does advertising work? Just did! Raycast is an application launcher thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software) Ray casting, however, is different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
- anshumankmr 7mo agoOne more step closer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c
- ex-aws-dude 7mo agoHow 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"
- tossandthrow 7mo agoLikely already happening.
- nubinetwork 7mo agoTo 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)
- itomato 7mo ago"Our affiliate solution partner"
- martianlantern 7mo agoWhy are they doing this?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- napo 7mo agoI 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.
- pavo-etc 7mo agoI don't know how Raycast could run on the GitHub servers, but a third option could be dataset poisoning. Hostile raycast advertising campaign
- _jdtm 7mo ago[dead]
- Surac 7mo agoas a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoPull 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
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- hsbauauvhabzb 7mo agoIt was only a matter of time. Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
- khvirabyan 7mo agoJust 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?
- 1una 7mo agoSeems like it: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agents/coding-agent/create-a-pr#asking-copilot-to-create-a-pull-request-from-raycast https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
- ayhanfuat 7mo agoYes. The same message in GitLab: https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/thomasvermeule/GeneralAviationAircraftFamilyBenchmark/-/merge_requests/7 https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/thomasvermeule/GeneralAviationAirc...
- lexicality 7mo agothat's an imported PR, presumably from github. Note how the copilot comments come from the same user as the author, with an `imported` tag.
- ayhanfuat 7mo agoI stand corrected. GitHub team confirmed it's their Copilot ad.
- crimsoneer 7mo agoYes, it seems very unlikely this is Copilot rather than Raycast, short of some very unexpected weirdness. I cling to that hope, anyway.
- connorgurney 7mo agoIndeed. I can’t see why Copilot would promote an unrelated third-party service…
- MattGaiser 7mo agoPost the trajectory if this is real.
- gpvos 7mo agoWhat 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.
- MattGaiser 7mo agoThe 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.
- pavo-etc 7mo agoThis is real. I do not have access to the path of reasoning, this ran through the GitHub copilot app which does not grant you access to the chain of thought.
- 0123456789ABCDE 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 will this shut you up?
- charcircuit 7mo agoThis 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-agents/coding-agent/create-a-pr#asking-copilot-to-create-a-pull-request-from-raycast 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).
- anton-g 7mo agoWell, you are not alone: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+copilot+coding+tasks%22&type=pullrequests https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jruohonen 7mo agoInteresting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?
- marcus_holmes 7mo agoI believe Codeberg is the new hotness
- steve1977 7mo agoIt is, but Codeberg is only for free and open source projects.
- sumuyuda 7mo agoCheck out https://codefloe.com https://codefloe.com for private repos hosted with Forgejo. It is also free and hosted in the EU.
- hvb2 7mo agoAre you actually using this? Their status page seems to indicate that their main service is unhealthy for the past 6 days? https://status.codefloe.com/ https://status.codefloe.com/ Unhealthy doesn't mean unusable but it sounded great until I checked that.
- 7mo ago
- oakpond 7mo agoI notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI tools too. It's awful.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ookblah 7mo agomaybe 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
- iomer 7mo agocrappy much. wow.
- raincole 7mo agoIs Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing the first large scale prompt injection abuse?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- vcryan 7mo agoI'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.
- 0123456789ABCDE 7mo agothis can be disabled with a setting: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-settings https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
- winna 7mo ago[dead]
- gherkinnn 7mo agoObnoxious 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.
- bryanhogan 7mo agoWhatever 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.
- SV_BubbleTime 7mo agoIf 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”.
- bryanhogan 7mo agoIt'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.
- hackable_sand 7mo agoWhat does AI have to do with it?
- rmnclmnt 7mo agoIsn’t this more of a Raycast issue (apparently an agentic ai service) instead of GH Copilot itself?
- treysu 7mo ago[dead]
- minsung0830 7mo ago[flagged]
- isoprophlex 7mo agoSatya "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.
- upmostly 7mo agoIsn't this the same as "Sent from my iPhone"?
- logicallee 7mo agoRelevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
- starkeeper 7mo agoThis 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.
- ZeroGravitas 7mo agoClaude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.
- baliex 7mo agoTo 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.
- probably_wrong 7mo agoNo. Plagiarism applies to people, not tools.
- ben_w 7mo agoEveryone who studies linguistics will tell you the rules of language are descriptive not proscriptive. This means that people saying "plagiarism" of an LLM, means that LLMs are necessarily in the set of things that can do plagiarism, regardless of if those same people would ever say this about a spanner. And you can also think about it a different way: a book is a tool for storing and distributing information, photocopying it is still plagiarism when done without attribution. Likewise, taking the output of an LLM, which is a tool for generating text in response to a prompt, without attribution, is as much plagiarism as if it came from a book. IMO, what matters most is that a lot of people want to be aware of if/when some content came from an LLM vs. from a human. That makes attribution useful, which makes it important to get right. And that's still the case even if you still object to the specific word "plagiarism".
- probably_wrong 7mo agoI don't think your example works because in the book case there's a clear author whose ideas are being reproduced without permission. The LLM in your example is not the author but rather the printing press, and no one would argue that the printing press' ideas are being stolen because the press doesn't have any. If one want to argue that "not citing the LLM would be plagiarism" then we would have to find the human at the end of the chain whose ideas are being reproduced, which would require LLMs to output "this idea was seen in the following training documents".
- crvdgc 7mo agoPeople, we just solved the LLM watermarking problem.
- plastic041 7mo agoThis "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-3076164344 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+AGENT+TIPS+--%3E%22&type=pullrequests&s=updated&o=asc&p=1 https://github.com/search?q=%22%3C%21--+START+COPILOT+CODING... Here are some of them: https://github.com/johannesPP/FS-Calculator/pull/2 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-Vite/pull/37 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.
- esperent 7mo agoHonestly, 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.
- mememememememo 7mo agoI miss the good old days whem there were "hire me" ads in NPM installs.
- wiseowise 7mo agoDecision 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- simonjgreen 7mo agoSo does Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Albeit more subtle, but they are hardly shy about it
- bfivyvysj 7mo agoYou can disable it. It's annoying wf.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- paweladamczuk 7mo agoI 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?
- jonathanstrange 7mo agoIt'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.
- heavyset_go 7mo agoThe 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.
- logicprog 7mo agoThis is a wild misinterpretation of that ruling.
- Grimblewald 7mo agotough 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.
- LtWorf 7mo ago
- shevy-java 7mo agoI 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.
- VBprogrammer 7mo agoA 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.
- harun_karaca 6mo agoTextbook 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.
- andai 7mo agoMan, what is the world coming to? -Sent from my iPhone
- caijia 7mo agoI'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.
- 6510 7mo agoI don't see an ad, I see a warning. I like it.
- croes 7mo agoSent-from-my-iPhone 2.0
- dathinab 7mo agoThis 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.
- volkadav 7mo agoOn the bright side, at least it's in the PR text and not the code? (... yet?) Sheesh.
- neya 7mo agoI 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-privacy-statement-and-terms-of-service-how-we-use-your-data/ https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv... 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.
- heavyset_go 7mo agoOpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.
- cromulent 7mo agoRegarding 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-use-personal-data-in-model-training#h_488fc4b87f https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023555-how-do-you-u...
- heavyset_go 7mo agoYou can opt out with all three (Codex, Claude, Copilot) except for Gemini
- dekoidal 7mo agoAfter hiring the brightest minds on the planet for years, the best these companies can think of is more ads.
- Luker88 7mo agooutrageous! -- 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
- Andrex 7mo agoYou 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.
- tourist2d 7mo ago[dead]
- martmulx 7mo ago[flagged]
- lloydatkinson 7mo agoWhat on earth is going on with that awful header moving around the page?
- g105b 7mo agoHopefully it is just copilot that is dying and not GitHub itself.
- impish9208 7mo agoNext up: watch a 30-second unskippable video ad to see your CI error logs!
- cmiles8 7mo agoAs 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.
- aeon_ai 7mo agoAt 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.
- tyleo 7mo agoIt’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+copilot+coding+tasks%22&type=pullrequests https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
- santiago-pl 7mo agoIt reminds me of Anthropic's Super Bowl ad: “Can I get a six pack quickly?” It actually turned out to be true.
- timrogers 7mo agoTim 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.
- miraculixx 7mo agoSo you continue to show ads to Copilt, just not to the user? If so, not a fix.
- tyleo 7mo agoI’m curious how the decision to include ads like this was made. Is that something you can share?
- shimman 7mo ago[flagged]
- ncr100 7mo agoMS was deemed a Monopoly I believe around '99 and was not broken up, was instead given behavioral edicts by the court. Microsoft owns GitHub where many of these ethical violations are easily found and were perpetrated. I speculate the cultural safety around that monopoly-power for corporate-benefit behavior could still be present and accepted for negotiations between MS and acquisition targets.
- poszlem 7mo agoShockingly poor judgment.
- QuadmasterXLII 7mo ago“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-copilot-inject-ads-i https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...
- hojeongna 7mo agofeels like it's just hardcoded into the prompt. not even trying to be subtle about it.
- tom-blk 7mo agoThis seems to be happening a lot, not sure it is actually intentional
- bustah 7mo ago[flagged]
- xbar 7mo agoMS needs to slow down their user hostility otherwise everyone will notice.
- NoNameHaveI 7mo agoSimilar 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.
- Waterluvian 7mo agoWhen 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?
- hedora 7mo agoClaude 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.
- simonw 7mo agoGitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/2038612131084464521 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.
- devnotes77 7mo ago[dead]
- 1970-01-01 7mo agoEnshittification 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.
- riverforest 7mo ago[flagged]
- lancetheai 7mo ago[flagged]
- gregatragenet3 7mo agoCursor added 'made with cursor' to its commits recently. I guess its just the dirction things are going that the tools are now self-promoting.
- boplicity 7mo agoYou 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.
- dboreham 7mo agoIronically tfa is festooned with ads.
- sunaookami 7mo agoOver 1.5 trillion news articles have ads injected into them by the company's commerce team!
- da_grift_shift 7mo agoSure, but the source blogpost isn't.
- wazionapps 7mo ago[flagged]
- saberience 7mo agoIt'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.
- ray_v 7mo agoAdding 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.
- bundie 7mo agoI believe its easy to disable the Claude Code one.
- bonesss 7mo agoWhen 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.
- coder543 7mo agoThat 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.
- allssu 7mo ago[dead]
- Aurornis 7mo agoI 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.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 7mo agoIt'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-settings https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
- silverwind 7mo agoI have instructions for these because the attribution settings don't accept placeholder tokens like `<model>`, `<version>` etc.
- lokimedes 7mo agoI 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?
- waisbrot 7mo agoLooking 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?
- 7mo ago
- rvz 7mo ago> "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.
- Hussell 7mo ago"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.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- Hussell 7mo agoDecisions are made by people in the group, not by a notional single being "the corporation". It's individual people making decisions about whether to go for short-term profit or long-term sustainability. Hold them accountable, don't shift the blame onto a nonexistent entity.
- ses1984 7mo agoI 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.
- hk__2 7mo agoIt’s not really ads, it’s more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.
- cozzyd 7mo agowhich is an ad... Sent from Firefox on AlmaLinux 9. https://getfirefox.com https://getfirefox.com https://almalinux.org https://almalinux.org
- phoe-krk 7mo agoI agree. It's not an advertisement, it's simply a piece of information about your particular choice of technology. -------------- Sent from HackerNews Supreme™ - the best way to browse the Y Combinator Hacker News. Now on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and SONY BRAVIA Smart TV. Prices starting at €13.99 per month, billed yearly. https://hacker-news-supreme.io https://hacker-news-supreme.io
- NetOpWibby 7mo agoDomain available for $50 from Cloudflare
- cozzyd 7mo agoI'm curious about how a hacker news client on a smart TV would work...
- phoe-krk 7mo agoYou can try it now! Prices starting at €13.99 per month, billed yearly.
- righthand 7mo agoThe 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.
- kstenerud 7mo agoThe 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.
- swimmingbrain 7mo ago[dead]
- jackp96 7mo agoSo, 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.
- dpoloncsak 7mo agoI'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.
- nemomarx 7mo agoIf 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?
- n1tro_lab 7mo ago[flagged]
- simonw 7mo agoIn case people missed it in the other thread, GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/2038612131084464521 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.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo agoI’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!”
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- johnnyanmac 7mo agoOf 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?
- da_grift_shift 7mo agoAccepting the megacorp euphemisms without critique ("product tips") is how enshittification festers.
- simonw 7mo agoI'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.
- ryguz 7mo ago[dead]
- tgtweak 7mo ago"Save time by changing your default browser to edge and enabling onedrive" "just tips bro"
- imta71770 7mo ago[flagged]
- heyaco 7mo agowhat kind of turd uses ai to correct a typo
- lpcvoid 7mo agoOnce again, Microslop doing Microslop things
- toastal 7mo agoYet folks are refusing to migrate off their products/services—as if it hasn’t been like this for 3 decades already.
- lpcvoid 7mo agoI 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.
- prvt 7mo agoBack 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37526255
- j45 7mo agoIt's the hotmail signature all over again?
- gadders 7mo agoThe irony when NeoWin covers it's whole page with "promoted content" when you try and back out of the page.
- sta1n 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- m132 7mo agoI 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.
- surgical_fire 7mo agoThis 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.
- m132 7mo agoIf 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...
- data-ottawa 7mo agoSame as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
- weiyong1024 7mo ago[flagged]
- barbazoo 7mo ago> 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.
- techpulselab 7mo ago[flagged]
- nickdothutton 7mo agoTitle is wrong, should be "New form of cancer discovered".
- fraywing 7mo agoAs 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.
- panavinsingh 7mo ago[flagged]
- sandeepkd 7mo agoIt 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.
- kingjimmy 7mo agomicroslop at it again
- wendy7756 7mo ago[dead]
- vmatouch 7mo agoSo 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.
- sanex 7mo agoCursor does similar at least. I hate it and therefore write my own commit messages.
- mococa 7mo agoClaude Code does the same.
- VadimPR 7mo agoThis 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.
- fph 7mo agoIn 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.
- kgeist 7mo agoI think ads can be removed with abliteration, just like refusals in "uncensored" versions. Find the "ad vector" across activations and cancel it.
- mergeshield 7mo ago[flagged]
- ajkjk 7mo agoThis only gets better when there's a financial penalty for doing it. Ads do almost nothing but it costs them even less.
- vicchenai 7mo agothe 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.
- siruwastaken 7mo agoI 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?
- liendolucas 7mo agoNot surprised at all, just another enshitified product by Microsoft. Carry on.
- thomasgeelens 7mo agoDamn Microsoft out here really finding new ways to serve ads.
- dboreham 7mo agoAt some point he who pays the piper was going to call the tune...
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 7mo agoExample of multiple items discussing the same topic, both on https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575212
- fortran77 7mo agoWell, 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.
- AsmodiusVI 7mo agoTime to get GitLab.
- palmotea 7mo agoHooray! This is the future we've all hoped for!
- Wojtkie 7mo agoMicroslop 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.
- amatecha 7mo agoIt's like the modern version of "Get your free email with Hotmail" or "This website hosted by Geocities".
- waynecochran 7mo agoAnyone have an example?
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- theAurenVale 7mo agothis 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
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- i18nagentai 7mo ago[flagged]
- motbus3 7mo agoWe 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.
- stratoatlas 7mo agoCopilot 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.
- zippolyon 7mo ago[dead]
- nullc 7mo agoPlease drink verification can to continue.
- bullshitnigga 7mo agoI call bullshit because the lightning emoji. I think you prompted it to say it
- hereme888 7mo agoMicrosoft strikes again, as expected. Now users will need additional scripts to clean up more MS junk.
- AdieuToLogic 7mo agoThe fact that Copilot injected an ad is burying the lede IMHO, as evidenced by the opening sentence: After a team member summoned Copilot to correct a typo in a PR of mine ... Using Copilot "to correct a typo" is the epitome of "jumping the shark"[0]. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
- RandyOrion 7mo agoWow, 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.
- trepaura 7mo ago50/50 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.
- alex1sa 7mo ago[flagged]
- berkeatac 7mo agoIs this achievable by poisoning?
- navilai 7mo ago[dead]