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GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash

614 points by _____k 6mo ago

aurareturn 6mo ago
Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats. I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI. I’m guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get something out there whether they make sense or not.
- gib444 6mo ago
  > Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats. Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.
- jofzar 6mo ago
  Microsoft doesn't believe in consent, it believes in yes or every 3 days.
  - jatins 6mo ago
    I am reminded of Steve Jobs's video where he says Microsoft has no taste everytime MS pushes this stuff on it's users. True in 90s, true now Video https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu
    - fsniper 6mo ago
      Well Unfortunately I can also argue, Apple has no taste anymore. At least, less of it day by day.
- xienze 6mo ago
  > Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats. The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think every other AI company or company integrating AI into their products won’t be using it as an advertising delivery vehicle.
  - skeeter2020 6mo ago
    exactly - the worst, or the best?
- petesergeant 6mo ago
  There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it doesn't work out.
  - aurareturn 6mo ago
    They've only invested $13b in OpenAI. They spent $68b on Activision Blizzard. I don't buy that quote. I think Microsoft is actually under huge threat from AI companies replacing their revenue stream.
Animats 6mo ago
Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions. Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.
- port11 6mo ago
  It was a “bad judgement call” this time because people noticed and complained. Next time it will be the right judgement call. Ach.
- computerfriend 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - verdverm 6mo ago
    Did you mean to link the parent HN comment from someone on the copilot team? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
  - notachatbot123 6mo ago
    ^ Prediction market spam
- zendist 6mo ago
  Talking about doing it is virtue signaling. Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same. VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.
  - oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
    I mean, this is a very obvious future step. I was imagining this too, although I stopped short at the 'ads in comments' stage, but who knows, they could easily go further.
yosamino 6mo ago
Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.
- altmanaltman 6mo ago
  A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.
  - logdu 6mo ago
    It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the mission of those who have education and means should be to show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is insulting to monkeys.
    - tornadofart 6mo ago
      The reflex to assign our morally wrong behaviour to the animal part in us is quite ironic. I just don't see jellyfish building concentration camps.
      - altmanaltman 6mo ago
        Yeah they just use their tentacles to catch prey and bring it into their body cavity, where they feed on and defecate out of the same opening. Maybe they don't because they lack the intellect to do so, not because they have any sense of morality.
        6mo ago
shevy-java 6mo ago
The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- verdverm 6mo ago
  perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload
scbrg 6mo ago
"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now." -- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition
- Ygg2 6mo ago
  Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.
  - wolvesechoes 6mo ago
    And thinking that megacorps are in any meaningful way different than your last underdog startup darling is another level of copium.
    - Ygg2 6mo ago
      Sure. But a startup could, in theory end up profitable and self-sufficient without a public offering. It's not impossible.
      - wolvesechoes 6mo ago
        Startups are about making money, take they capital with a promise of making more capital, and the logic of capital is uniform, no matter where it comes from. It always, without exception, will end up the same, with the only difference how much time it will take.
        Ygg2 6mo ago
        That's why I said in theory. Consider that at some point Valve was a startup.
        Dylan16807 6mo ago
        It really depends on what kind of investment they took. Venture is probably worse than going public with the desire to moonshot. A loan is pretty harmless, since they want you to repay a fixed amount with as much stability as possible.
altmanaltman 6mo ago
> Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call." Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.
- verdverm 6mo ago
  Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188
- pjc50 6mo ago
  > letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.
  - scott_w 6mo ago
    I haven’t seen it but the article makes it sound like, when you ask for it to make a change to your code, that’s the point it puts the ad in. I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time, without your permission. If that’s correct then it’s truly heinous.
  - heyethan 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
- 6mo ago
synack 6mo ago
Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for decades.
- kadoban 6mo ago
  Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.
- DonHopkins 6mo ago
  Wow, I haven't heard that name for decades.
  - johnisgood 6mo ago
    Jeez, that makes me feel old, and I am "only" just barely in 30. :( Remember https://web.archive.org/web/20050204100149/http://cia.navi.cx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050204100149/http://cia.navi.c... BTW? For the uninitiated: https://web.archive.org/web/20050129022102/http://cia.navi.cx/doc https://web.archive.org/web/20050129022102/http://cia.navi.c.... :D Good times! This takes me back. It is just one of those artifacts of early 2000s that was associated with open source hacker culture. It truly felt magical at the time.
- oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
  Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will now repeat the process.
  - zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo ago
    SF required application form, where you had to explain why you are worthy to have your git repo hosted by SF. By the time they processed it I already forgot I even applied. I think that was actual reason for them being destroyed by GitHub, that had simple, fully automated signup.
- trueno 6mo ago
  yeah, uh you're definitely driving home the point here. that's why no one uses sourceforge anymore.
aquir 6mo ago
I would be curious what Raycast’s reaction is. They just got caught in the crossfire or they deliberately bought ads to be placed with Copilot
- staindk 6mo ago
  Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are smarter than that. But who knows.
  - kadoban 6mo ago
    I'm sure they sold this ad space at a premium and someone over there thought it was a brilliant idea. How else would it have happened?
  - VadimPR 6mo ago
    They posted previously on YN that they too were caught offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it decided to feature now.
Dansvidania 6mo ago
the microsoft playbook
plagiarist 6mo ago
First of all, I find it enraging that dimwitted AI companies decided to edit PR descriptions for anything at all.
- etiennebausson 6mo ago
  Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in many case?
  - duskwuff 6mo ago
    GitHub was only modifying the description of the PR itself, not the commit messages for the commits included in the PR.
heipei 6mo ago
I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.
- ozim 6mo ago
  Exactly same for me. If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.
akmarinov 6mo ago
Remember when they wanted to charge for self hosted runners and “backed down”, let’s see how long it lasts
devsda 6mo ago
So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ? That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism. Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.
puppycodes 6mo ago
I'm not suprised Raycast is involved in this marketing scheme. They pollute their own product with ads where they shouldn't be. Whoever is running their marketing team needs a lesson in not pissing off your userbase.
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me. Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and that I’ll stay put, thanks.
  - puppycodes 6mo ago
    Yeah same 100%
- krtkush 6mo ago
  Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were involved with it in any manner.
crvdgc 6mo ago
> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub They already did! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245
- pseufaux 6mo ago
  > They already did Yes, but they don't and won't too (at least until they do again)
shortercode 6mo ago
Push push push. When your customers are livid at you take a small step back. Wait for a moment then come back at them from another angle. I hate this philosophy. But it’s seems to be the preferred path for Microsoft.
nubinetwork 6mo ago
> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub For another six months.
bilekas 6mo ago
> We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward. Why does this read as they are saying it was a mistake ? Because it absolutely wasn't, and it will absolutely happen again, maybe just less obvious next time.
- charcircuit 6mo ago
  How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting added somewhere it shouldn't have been.
  - bilekas 6mo ago
    Because it was already mentioned that it was a bad call by an internal dev. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 > 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. Either way, even if it was a mistake, giving the ability to modify someone else's PR without prompt, in any scenario should have been tested, oh I don't know.. At least once.
  - account42 6mo ago
    You don't seriously believe that a company's PR release is the same as the truth or what the people inside that company believe. And no, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt after the umpteenth time that their "mistake" caused an outrage.
xfactorial 6mo ago
I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them. I believe there are two caveats on it: 1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user. 2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).
- deathanatos 6mo ago
  > I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them. The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?
  - oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
    I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer, relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going to get steadily more and more expensive over time.
- afferi300rina 6mo ago
  The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a high-focus environment.
dagi3d 6mo ago
And what about the companies that thought that advertising (sorry, suggesting) their product through this channel was a good idea?
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  Don't assume they were in on it. Microsoft plays very weird games with platform access and traffic.
BLKNSLVR 6mo ago
"OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"
- ozim 6mo ago
  Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this: "old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks" "new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up" "he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"
yakshaving_jgt 6mo ago
I wonder if the PM responsible for this will be held accountable. Who should resign? I'm guessing the answers will be predictable and disappointing.
- Ylpertnodi 6mo ago
  > Who should resign? And achieve what?
  - yakshaving_jgt 6mo ago
    A healthy culture where leadership is held accountable, and egregious errors in judgement are treated with the seriousness they deserve.
oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
It's great that they backed down, but they still did it in the first place. GitHub is on borrowed time now; my own repos are insignificant, but I'll definitely look to move somewhere else this year, and I'm sure many others will too.
insin 6mo ago
Would you like Copilot to generate ads? [Yes] [Maybe later]
joegibbs 6mo ago
But why were they running unpaid ads for third party services? It makes no sense
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  So they can drop them at some point and then hold the party that has now become dependent on those ads to ransom and/or as a way to soften them up before acquisition.
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  It can make sense if the premise that nobody is steering the ship is accepted to be true.
fer 6mo ago
That just means they'll be more subtle once the dust settles.
cetinsert 6mo ago
This was a humiliation ritual!
lopis 6mo ago
This is peak entishitification and a quick way to burn a lot of goodwill and trust fast.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  Microsoft had a lot of goodwill?
  - lopis 6mo ago
    No, Github did.
pm90 6mo ago
Microslop is clearly flailing. They were first movers with the OAI investment but OAI is doing fine on its own and microslop failed to capitalize on that early momentum. Now they’re resorting to increasingly desperate measures across their product portfolio to stay relevant.
- throwaway902984 6mo ago
  > OAI is doing fine on its own This isn't my understanding of their current state of affairs, especially regardless their finances?
sylware 6mo ago
Microsoft github.com should restore classic web compatibility for the core functions (issue tracking, etc) and be native IPv6.
latexr 6mo ago
It’s good they walked it back, but the fact it was implemented in the first place is a signal of their thinking and inexcusable in itself. Trust is easier to lose than to gain, and Microdoft continues to break trust.
- account42 6mo ago
  Microsoft has been breaking trust since the 90s. If they have any left then perhaps it's not as easy to lose as you say.
wolvoleo 6mo ago
> Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward." What a joke. It literally went in and edited the PR description 8 minutes after the user submitted it. That's not a tip somehow ending up in the wrong context. If it were it would have happened at submission time. At least be honest. Yuck.
ExoticPearTree 6mo ago
I wonder what was the thought process when they green lit this feature and thought it is a good idea.
ezoe 6mo ago
I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.
- putna 6mo ago
  i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.
- gk-- 6mo ago
  even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams. they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.
  - ahartmetz 6mo ago
    Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?
    - jeltz 6mo ago
      It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR. It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.
      - jon-wood 6mo ago
        Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched. If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.
idkwhatimdoing2 6mo ago
finally they are coming to their senses time is money, save both.try ramp.
bradley13 6mo ago
I moved almost everything off of GitHub when MS bought it. Go to GitLab or CodeBerg, depending...
ares623 6mo ago
Microsoft Always Chickens Out
mnmnmn 6mo ago
[dead]
zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo ago
GitLab team on other hand is unyielding, they love adding their "Closes #" in MRs and don't care about people that ask to get rid of it.
- ptx 6mo ago
  What is this referring to? Is GitLab using AI to guess which issue a merge request is meant to fix?
  - zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo ago
    No, they detect issue symbol in branch name or commit title and add "Closes #123" at the end of merge request description.
skywhopper 6mo ago
Updated to add on March 31: Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward." Wow, well that is clearly a bald-faced lie.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  They're not even trying. But this time 'the hacker did it' excuse wouldn't hold so they had to come up with something new in a hurry.
lloydatkinson 6mo ago
It would have been less controversial to place an ad somewhere at the top of the screen. Putting it in the Markdown feels like a very deliberate and antagonistic fuck you to everyone.
cmiles8 6mo ago
The lack of market understanding by the person that thought this “feature” was a good idea is staggering. There was never a world where developers would think this is a good idea.
- contravariant 6mo ago
  The fact that they chose to publish the ad _under someone else's name_ is so tone deaf that I just can't understand what they were thinking.
  - Aachen 6mo ago
    This. It's so far out there that I have to wonder if it's a rogue employee who thought this a good excuse to cause reputational damage without it being too obvious. Doesn't pass several razors though (not the simplest explanation; malice involved.. is that Hanlon's and Occam's razor?), so I don't truly believe it... but it would be possible
    - contravariant 6mo ago
      Since it's AI and Microsoft I can believe that someone who doesn't know what they're doing would be given a mandate to promote AI under any means necessary at the cost of some other team's reputation. But it's an insane move. If anything AI has made it more important than ever to know who authored something and then someone does this to promote AI.
    - account42 6mo ago
      Occam's razor is about the simplest solution often being the correct one. Hanlon's razor is about not assuming malice, which makes no sense when applied to faceless mega-corporations or even random strangers where you know conflicting motives exist.
      - Aachen 6mo ago
        Thanks for confirming I remembered the razor names correctly! I still don't assume malice, at least as a default / until strongly indicated otherwise, from any individual employee. Emergent behavior of complex artificial incentive systems is, of course, a whole other matter so I can see what you mean that the razor won't apply there without breaking it down to an individual as in the scenario I mentioned about an ill-meaning employee
vasco 6mo ago
Still waiting for their next attempt at charging for self hosted runners. That's going to be a pain of a migration.
- gmerc 6mo ago
  forgejo.org
  - vasco 6mo ago
    I don't need ads
_pdp_ 6mo ago
How long will take GitHub to backtrack on the "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" aggressive setting?
- moi2388 6mo ago
  I don’t buy that they respect that setting in the slightest
t312227 6mo ago
hello, ah ... another clear case of AGI *) ... *) ads generated income just my 0.02€
beaker52 6mo ago
The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert adverts into a platform full of paying users. The moment your company starts playing a pauper and enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I’m not paying you money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.
aiedwardyi 6mo ago
[flagged]
- tourist2d 6mo ago
  [dead]
conartist6 6mo ago
But it's a perfect fit for their business strategy of forcibly inserting their software into your anus..! How could it have gone wrong??
obelai 6mo ago
[dead]
rrgok 6mo ago
Microsoft, how cheap minded you have to be to understand that you don't need ads? You already had everything you need to grow without slapping ads everywhere. You had everything great. Xbox, Windows, Office,... and somehow in a short span of time you managed to enshittify everything. Focus on you core strength. Ads is not one of them. And the combination Ads+Ai it is not either. Stop ruining great things. You had - still have - great potential to have a competitive advantage over others yet you fall for these shitty practices. I believe, if you had the chance, you would put ads on the C# compiler too.
- moi2388 6mo ago
  Like npm?
arnvald 6mo ago
I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…
- giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored. With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway. It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this? This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.
  - alsetmusic 6mo ago
    > It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this? Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.
    - giancarlostoro 6mo ago
      You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.
      - philipov 6mo ago
        Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.
        recursive 6mo ago
TheProductAgent 6mo ago
[dead]
b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
This is how these kinds of companies operate; push the limit until customers start complaining, then you back off a little bit. They've still advanced to that line, of course, but now the userbase can be conditioned for the next push so that "a little bit worse than before" feels normal.
dgxyz 6mo ago
If a company backtracks on this it still has ethical issues. It didn’t just get away with it this time. You owe it to yourself and others to stay the fuck away from them.
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
The referenced discussion: Copilot edited an ad into my PR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
MeetRickAI 6mo ago
[dead]
spixy 6mo ago
"Updated: Microsoft has done a 180. Following backlash from developers, GitHub has removed Copilot's ability to stick ads - what it calls "tips" - into any pull request that invokes its name."

614 points by _____k 6mo ago

Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats. I'm pro-AI adoption but the way Microsoft distastefully forces Copilot into everything is how you get people to hate AI. I’m guessing product teams are told by upper management to AI-fy every product they own. Teams are then rushed to just get something out there whether they make sense or not.

gib444 6mo ago
> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats. Microsoft will always be a company that pushes things on people rather than building things that attract people. It's in their DNA.
jofzar 6mo ago
Microsoft doesn't believe in consent, it believes in yes or every 3 days.
- jatins 6mo ago
  I am reminded of Steve Jobs's video where he says Microsoft has no taste everytime MS pushes this stuff on it's users. True in 90s, true now Video https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu https://youtu.be/lahX_ARGTqA?si=AnULWzRbl7cc3UWu
  - fsniper 6mo ago
    Well Unfortunately I can also argue, Apple has no taste anymore. At least, less of it day by day.
xienze 6mo ago
> Microsoft is seriously the worst offender in shoving AI down everyone's throats. The worst, or just ahead of the curve? Because you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think every other AI company or company integrating AI into their products won’t be using it as an advertising delivery vehicle.
- skeeter2020 6mo ago
  exactly - the worst, or the best?
petesergeant 6mo ago
There was a great quote in an article I read from here recently along the lines of: Microsoft have invested enough in OpenAI that it's not their problem -- not Sam Altman's -- if it doesn't work out.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  They've only invested $13b in OpenAI. They spent $68b on Activision Blizzard. I don't buy that quote. I think Microsoft is actually under huge threat from AI companies replacing their revenue stream.

Animats 6mo ago

Microsoft will probably try to sneak it back in later. They've done that with other intrusions. Migrating away from Github just increased in priority.

port11 6mo ago
It was a “bad judgement call” this time because people noticed and complained. Next time it will be the right judgement call. Ach.
computerfriend 6mo ago
[flagged]
- verdverm 6mo ago
  Did you mean to link the parent HN comment from someone on the copilot team? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
- notachatbot123 6mo ago
  ^ Prediction market spam
zendist 6mo ago
Talking about doing it is virtue signaling. Don't just say, do! If you have a popular repository, share news of your migration to drive others to do the same. VOTE WITH YOUR FEET, PEOPLE!
DonHopkins 6mo ago
Instead of polluting PRs, Copilot will insert comments and logging and text fields and buttons with links to web sites with helpful product tips into your code and user interfaces.
- oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
  I mean, this is a very obvious future step. I was imagining this too, although I stopped short at the 'ads in comments' stage, but who knows, they could easily go further.

yosamino 6mo ago

Calling advertisements "product tips" as if everybody is too stupid to understand what that means. They created an amazing technology that oftentimes is indistinguishable from magic and then use it to deliver ads and - sorry about the tangent - kill people. This really is the quote of the century: > The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads What a waste.

altmanaltman 6mo ago
A lot of amazing technology has been invented just for the purpose of killing people. It's nothing new. Humans are monkeys that like to kill other monkeys and no amount of civilization will change that.
- logdu 6mo ago
  It certainly won't change with that kind of attitude. Don't you want to live a peaceful life and be free from your baser instincts? I believe most people do, and if they don't, the mission of those who have education and means should be to show the way in that direction, instead of shrugging off the worst things and excusing them on "monkeys", which IMO is insulting to monkeys.
  - tornadofart 6mo ago
    The reflex to assign our morally wrong behaviour to the animal part in us is quite ironic. I just don't see jellyfish building concentration camps.
    - altmanaltman 6mo ago
      Yeah they just use their tentacles to catch prey and bring it into their body cavity, where they feed on and defecate out of the same opening. Maybe they don't because they lack the intellect to do so, not because they have any sense of morality.
      - 6mo ago

shevy-java 6mo ago

The problem is that Microslop is not THINKING. What is the point of inserting ads? That just increases the spam output. Sure, Microslop may think this helps boost their revenue but many people hate ad-spam. After I started to use ublock origin, there was no way back to the unsafe ads-down-the-turtles approach anymore. Ads waste people's time and money.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
verdverm 6mo ago
perhaps they forgot to set thinking mode in the LLM payload

scbrg 6mo ago

"You're just a bunch of fanatic, Linux obsessed Microsoft haters living in the past. Microsoft are the good guys now." -- ca. everyone here, during the GitHub acquisition

Ygg2 6mo ago
Thinking of megacorps as anything other than slimy, amoral, scum honestly requires superhuman levels of mental gymnastics.
- wolvesechoes 6mo ago
  And thinking that megacorps are in any meaningful way different than your last underdog startup darling is another level of copium.
  - Ygg2 6mo ago
    Sure. But a startup could, in theory end up profitable and self-sufficient without a public offering. It's not impossible.
    - wolvesechoes 6mo ago
      Startups are about making money, take they capital with a promise of making more capital, and the logic of capital is uniform, no matter where it comes from. It always, without exception, will end up the same, with the only difference how much time it will take.
      - Ygg2 6mo ago
        That's why I said in theory. Consider that at some point Valve was a startup.
      - Dylan16807 6mo ago
        It really depends on what kind of investment they took. Venture is probably worse than going public with the desire to moonshot. A loan is pretty harmless, since they want you to repay a fixed amount with as much stability as possible.

altmanaltman 6mo ago

> Hearing feedback from the community following Manson's post and the kerfuffle it generated, Rogers said, has helped him realize that "on reflection," letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge "was the wrong judgement call." Thankfully, they need the community feedback to realize it was wrong. It was so hard to guess it was wrong without the feedback! It's good to know these people are in charge of building Copilot.

verdverm 6mo ago
Would be cool if they listened to us about the top voted feedback of all time, re: when the destroyed the feed https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188
pjc50 6mo ago
> letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge Wait, did they really sneak this in entirely without user interaction? So people trying not to use AI would still risk being ""contaminated""? Incredible breach of trust. Similar kind of thing to lying about whether your product is vegan.
- scott_w 6mo ago
  I haven’t seen it but the article makes it sound like, when you ask for it to make a change to your code, that’s the point it puts the ad in. I think (but not 100% sure) that it also puts it directly into your codebase, without you knowing ahead of time, without your permission. If that’s correct then it’s truly heinous.
- heyethan 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
6mo ago

synack 6mo ago

Yet Sourceforge has been putting ads on open source projects for decades.

kadoban 6mo ago
Yeah, that's part of why nobody wants to use Sourceforge.
DonHopkins 6mo ago
Wow, I haven't heard that name for decades.
- johnisgood 6mo ago
  Jeez, that makes me feel old, and I am "only" just barely in 30. :( Remember https://web.archive.org/web/20050204100149/http://cia.navi.cx/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050204100149/http://cia.navi.c... BTW? For the uninitiated: https://web.archive.org/web/20050129022102/http://cia.navi.cx/doc https://web.archive.org/web/20050129022102/http://cia.navi.c.... :D Good times! This takes me back. It is just one of those artifacts of early 2000s that was associated with open source hacker culture. It truly felt magical at the time.
oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
Ironically, that's what probably killed Sourceforge and helped GitHub take off. It remains to be seen whether Codeberg will now repeat the process.
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo ago
  SF required application form, where you had to explain why you are worthy to have your git repo hosted by SF. By the time they processed it I already forgot I even applied. I think that was actual reason for them being destroyed by GitHub, that had simple, fully automated signup.
trueno 6mo ago
yeah, uh you're definitely driving home the point here. that's why no one uses sourceforge anymore.

aquir 6mo ago

I would be curious what Raycast’s reaction is. They just got caught in the crossfire or they deliberately bought ads to be placed with Copilot

staindk 6mo ago
Doubt Raycast would have known about this, think they are smarter than that. But who knows.
- kadoban 6mo ago
  I'm sure they sold this ad space at a premium and someone over there thought it was a brilliant idea. How else would it have happened?
- VadimPR 6mo ago
  They posted previously on YN that they too were caught offguard. The 'tips' weren't specific to Raycast, they've been going on for a while and Raycast was just one product it decided to feature now.

Dansvidania 6mo ago

the microsoft playbook

plagiarist 6mo ago

First of all, I find it enraging that dimwitted AI companies decided to edit PR descriptions for anything at all.

etiennebausson 6mo ago
Wouldn't it change the hash, making push requests conflict in many case?
- duskwuff 6mo ago
  GitHub was only modifying the description of the PR itself, not the commit messages for the commits included in the PR.

heipei 6mo ago

I just saw the headline fly by yesterday and thought that this was just another dumb bug in what is the slow decline of GitHub. To find out today that this was very much intentional is even worse.

ozim 6mo ago
Exactly same for me. If I think about it, that was in my head accounted as „no one would be that stupid”.

akmarinov 6mo ago

Remember when they wanted to charge for self hosted runners and “backed down”, let’s see how long it lasts

devsda 6mo ago

So, after Windows cleanup announcement nobody at Github thought "may be we should review all our copilot integrations to avoid another embarrassment for MS" ? That shows either it was just a Windows org announcement and not a culture change at MS or it was just an empty promise to temporarily deflect mounting criticism. Either way it is disappointment for anyone who thought it was a genuine case of introspection and change of heart at MS.

puppycodes 6mo ago

I'm not suprised Raycast is involved in this marketing scheme. They pollute their own product with ads where they shouldn't be. Whoever is running their marketing team needs a lesson in not pissing off your userbase.

kstrauser 6mo ago
Sometimes I see something nifty in Raycast and it tempts me. Then I see something weird from them, look in the Alfred manual, and realize it already supports the same feature and that I’ll stay put, thanks.
- puppycodes 6mo ago
  Yeah same 100%
krtkush 6mo ago
Someone, claiming to be from the Raycast team, in the original HN thread said that they were not aware of the advert or were involved with it in any manner.

crvdgc 6mo ago

> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub They already did! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/65245

pseufaux 6mo ago
> They already did Yes, but they don't and won't too (at least until they do again)

shortercode 6mo ago

Push push push. When your customers are livid at you take a small step back. Wait for a moment then come back at them from another angle. I hate this philosophy. But it’s seems to be the preferred path for Microsoft.

nubinetwork 6mo ago

> GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub For another six months.

bilekas 6mo ago

> We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward. Why does this read as they are saying it was a mistake ? Because it absolutely wasn't, and it will absolutely happen again, maybe just less obvious next time.

charcircuit 6mo ago
How do you know better if it was a mistake than GitHub themselves? It is possible that the tip was only supposed to show up in some other place and it accidentally started getting added somewhere it shouldn't have been.
- bilekas 6mo ago
  Because it was already mentioned that it was a bad call by an internal dev. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 > 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. Either way, even if it was a mistake, giving the ability to modify someone else's PR without prompt, in any scenario should have been tested, oh I don't know.. At least once.
- account42 6mo ago
  You don't seriously believe that a company's PR release is the same as the truth or what the people inside that company believe. And no, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt after the umpteenth time that their "mistake" caused an outrage.

xfactorial 6mo ago

I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them. I believe there are two caveats on it: 1. Approach: to make the experience worth it, so that ads are not very intrusive , done correctly, which, over and over and over, it is proven contrarious to the interest of the user. 2. Relevance: if you are going to put ads onto your product, make sure things are done correctly, curate if possible what will be shown (I believe Microsoft's worse fear would be to see online casinos ads onto something like GitHub, as an example).

deathanatos 6mo ago
> I understand "free services" eventually come to the conclusion of either charging or using ads to finance and even make money out of them. The endgame is not "or", it's "and": eventually come to the conclusion that, why choose between revenue streams when we could just have both?
- oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago
  I think we'll see companies increasingly adopting the X approach: charged tiers for 'fewer' ads. With no actual guarantee as to the absolute quantity of ads, just 'fewer, relative to the people who aren't paying as much'. We're basically on a downward slope where not seeing ads is going to get steadily more and more expensive over time.
afferi300rina 6mo ago
The issue is context. GitHub is a professional workbench, not social media. Any "tip" that serves as an ad is just noise in a high-focus environment.

dagi3d 6mo ago

And what about the companies that thought that advertising (sorry, suggesting) their product through this channel was a good idea?

jacquesm 6mo ago
Don't assume they were in on it. Microsoft plays very weird games with platform access and traffic.

BLKNSLVR 6mo ago

"OK guys, back to the drawing board. How can we market this better? How long do we wait until this WILL fly under the radar?"

ozim 6mo ago
Feels like you never worked at corporation it goes more like this: "old employees who know the environment and are in tune with community are playing safe so they don't bring in immediate results, feels like progress stagnates, so they move those people to other tasks" "new clueless manager joins, has to come up with a brilliant idea (that actually is bad across the board for someone who understands the environment) to get quarterly bonus, then convinces bunch of |out of touch suites| with power point presentation where numbers go up" "he gets burned by community response, becomes more conservative - next quarters he is moved away or he moves away on his own - new clueless can come into his place"

yakshaving_jgt 6mo ago

I wonder if the PM responsible for this will be held accountable. Who should resign? I'm guessing the answers will be predictable and disappointing.

Ylpertnodi 6mo ago
> Who should resign? And achieve what?
- yakshaving_jgt 6mo ago
  A healthy culture where leadership is held accountable, and egregious errors in judgement are treated with the seriousness they deserve.

oneeyedpigeon 6mo ago

It's great that they backed down, but they still did it in the first place. GitHub is on borrowed time now; my own repos are insignificant, but I'll definitely look to move somewhere else this year, and I'm sure many others will too.

insin 6mo ago

Would you like Copilot to generate ads? [Yes] [Maybe later]

joegibbs 6mo ago

But why were they running unpaid ads for third party services? It makes no sense

jacquesm 6mo ago
So they can drop them at some point and then hold the party that has now become dependent on those ads to ransom and/or as a way to soften them up before acquisition.
ssl-3 6mo ago
It can make sense if the premise that nobody is steering the ship is accepted to be true.

fer 6mo ago

That just means they'll be more subtle once the dust settles.

cetinsert 6mo ago

This was a humiliation ritual!

lopis 6mo ago

This is peak entishitification and a quick way to burn a lot of goodwill and trust fast.

jacquesm 6mo ago
Microsoft had a lot of goodwill?
- lopis 6mo ago
  No, Github did.

pm90 6mo ago

Microslop is clearly flailing. They were first movers with the OAI investment but OAI is doing fine on its own and microslop failed to capitalize on that early momentum. Now they’re resorting to increasingly desperate measures across their product portfolio to stay relevant.

throwaway902984 6mo ago
> OAI is doing fine on its own This isn't my understanding of their current state of affairs, especially regardless their finances?

sylware 6mo ago

Microsoft github.com should restore classic web compatibility for the core functions (issue tracking, etc) and be native IPv6.

latexr 6mo ago

It’s good they walked it back, but the fact it was implemented in the first place is a signal of their thinking and inexcusable in itself. Trust is easier to lose than to gain, and Microdoft continues to break trust.

account42 6mo ago
Microsoft has been breaking trust since the 90s. If they have any left then perhaps it's not as easy to lose as you say.

wolvoleo 6mo ago

> Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward." What a joke. It literally went in and edited the PR description 8 minutes after the user submitted it. That's not a tip somehow ending up in the wrong context. If it were it would have happened at submission time. At least be honest. Yuck.

ExoticPearTree 6mo ago

I wonder what was the thought process when they green lit this feature and thought it is a good idea.

ezoe 6mo ago

I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.

putna 6mo ago
i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.
gk-- 6mo ago
even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams. they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.
- ahartmetz 6mo ago
  Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?
  - jeltz 6mo ago
    It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR. It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.
    - jon-wood 6mo ago
      Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched. If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.

idkwhatimdoing2 6mo ago

finally they are coming to their senses time is money, save both.try ramp.

bradley13 6mo ago

I moved almost everything off of GitHub when MS bought it. Go to GitLab or CodeBerg, depending...

ares623 6mo ago

Microsoft Always Chickens Out

mnmnmn 6mo ago

[dead]

zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo ago

GitLab team on other hand is unyielding, they love adding their "Closes #" in MRs and don't care about people that ask to get rid of it.

ptx 6mo ago
What is this referring to? Is GitLab using AI to guess which issue a merge request is meant to fix?
- zvqcMMV6Zcr 6mo ago
  No, they detect issue symbol in branch name or commit title and add "Closes #123" at the end of merge request description.

skywhopper 6mo ago

Updated to add on March 31: Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub, said in a statement: "GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward." Wow, well that is clearly a bald-faced lie.

jacquesm 6mo ago
They're not even trying. But this time 'the hacker did it' excuse wouldn't hold so they had to come up with something new in a hurry.

lloydatkinson 6mo ago

It would have been less controversial to place an ad somewhere at the top of the screen. Putting it in the Markdown feels like a very deliberate and antagonistic fuck you to everyone.

cmiles8 6mo ago

The lack of market understanding by the person that thought this “feature” was a good idea is staggering. There was never a world where developers would think this is a good idea.

contravariant 6mo ago
The fact that they chose to publish the ad _under someone else's name_ is so tone deaf that I just can't understand what they were thinking.
- Aachen 6mo ago
  This. It's so far out there that I have to wonder if it's a rogue employee who thought this a good excuse to cause reputational damage without it being too obvious. Doesn't pass several razors though (not the simplest explanation; malice involved.. is that Hanlon's and Occam's razor?), so I don't truly believe it... but it would be possible
  - contravariant 6mo ago
    Since it's AI and Microsoft I can believe that someone who doesn't know what they're doing would be given a mandate to promote AI under any means necessary at the cost of some other team's reputation. But it's an insane move. If anything AI has made it more important than ever to know who authored something and then someone does this to promote AI.
  - account42 6mo ago
    Occam's razor is about the simplest solution often being the correct one. Hanlon's razor is about not assuming malice, which makes no sense when applied to faceless mega-corporations or even random strangers where you know conflicting motives exist.
    - Aachen 6mo ago
      Thanks for confirming I remembered the razor names correctly! I still don't assume malice, at least as a default / until strongly indicated otherwise, from any individual employee. Emergent behavior of complex artificial incentive systems is, of course, a whole other matter so I can see what you mean that the razor won't apply there without breaking it down to an individual as in the scenario I mentioned about an ill-meaning employee

vasco 6mo ago

Still waiting for their next attempt at charging for self hosted runners. That's going to be a pain of a migration.

gmerc 6mo ago
forgejo.org
- vasco 6mo ago
  I don't need ads

_pdp_ 6mo ago

How long will take GitHub to backtrack on the "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training" aggressive setting?

moi2388 6mo ago
I don’t buy that they respect that setting in the slightest

t312227 6mo ago

hello, ah ... another clear case of AGI *) ... *) ads generated income just my 0.02€

beaker52 6mo ago

The play was to use AI as an opportunity to quietly insert adverts into a platform full of paying users. The moment your company starts playing a pauper and enshitificating the products I already pay for, is the moment I stop giving you any money at all. Try it. I’m not paying you money so you can try to make more money from me. Either add value and convince me to pay more, or fuck off.

aiedwardyi 6mo ago

[flagged]

tourist2d 6mo ago
[dead]

conartist6 6mo ago

But it's a perfect fit for their business strategy of forcibly inserting their software into your anus..! How could it have gone wrong??

obelai 6mo ago

[dead]

rrgok 6mo ago

Microsoft, how cheap minded you have to be to understand that you don't need ads? You already had everything you need to grow without slapping ads everywhere. You had everything great. Xbox, Windows, Office,... and somehow in a short span of time you managed to enshittify everything. Focus on you core strength. Ads is not one of them. And the combination Ads+Ai it is not either. Stop ruining great things. You had - still have - great potential to have a competitive advantage over others yet you fall for these shitty practices. I believe, if you had the chance, you would put ads on the C# compiler too.

moi2388 6mo ago
Like npm?

arnvald 6mo ago

I’ll never understand why they ruined GitHub. They had everything they needed - the one place in the world where 99% of open source projects were hosted, where all the discussions happened. A product that people were so used to that it was a no brainer when it came to hosting private repos. And they had to ruin it and give space to GitLab and other competitors. What a waste…

giancarlostoro 6mo ago
The worst part of Microsoft is whoever is running their marketing department, they just inject themselves into everything, like Windows. GitHub is different, they will 100% lose users and income if they don't learn to back the hell off of it though. Windows, well, everyone complains about Windows no matter what, so valid complaints are ignored. With Office, well, your employer is paying for it, so you have no say in it anyway. It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this? This is why I say, marketing driven development is garbage.
- alsetmusic 6mo ago
  > It's clearly the marketing dept at Microsoft swoops in and poisons all their software, who else would be doing this? Capitalism (and it's demands of the market) at its finest.
  - giancarlostoro 6mo ago
    You can be a capitalist without ruining your product.
    - philipov 6mo ago
      Capitalism means ownership by investors, and it is the investors who ruin your product.
      - recursive 6mo ago

TheProductAgent 6mo ago

[dead]

b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago

This is how these kinds of companies operate; push the limit until customers start complaining, then you back off a little bit. They've still advanced to that line, of course, but now the userbase can be conditioned for the next push so that "a little bit worse than before" feels normal.

dgxyz 6mo ago

If a company backtracks on this it still has ethical issues. It didn’t just get away with it this time. You owe it to yourself and others to stay the fuck away from them.

ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

The referenced discussion: Copilot edited an ad into my PR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269

MeetRickAI 6mo ago

[dead]

spixy 6mo ago

"Updated: Microsoft has done a 180. Following backlash from developers, GitHub has removed Copilot's ability to stick ads - what it calls "tips" - into any pull request that invokes its name."