> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.
BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago [-]
> Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior
I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time who are still working there today is very small.
burkaman 1 hours ago [-]
One of those people is the CEO though.
27 minutes ago [-]
tyleo 5 hours ago [-]
I haven’t clicked through so all I know about Raycast is, “that’s the company that gets shoved into ads by copilot.”
Sounds like it’s not your fault but it’s probably doing some brand damage :/
delfinom 5 hours ago [-]
They should probably get a lawyer to send a C&D.
buildbot 5 hours ago [-]
There’s like 100 comments blaming raycast, they should just sue for damages lol.
grayhatter 4 hours ago [-]
Had I not seen this thread, I would have assumed they consented to it, and I'd never willingly interact with Raycast or it's team in any way. I still have a somewhat negative opinion, so I think it's safe to say there are damages.
tylerchilds 2 hours ago [-]
As a data point, I consent to be counted as associating raycast with the Microsoft brand and viewing them negatively as a consequence of using pull requests as an advertising canvas.
BloondAndDoom 3 hours ago [-]
I hear you, but honestly it’s kind of funny to think a company would send C&D to stop free advertising for them. I’d be surprising to see if any company ever does that, whatever the people think small brands worth they actually worth way less than that.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago [-]
Is it free advertising or free brand damage? (people might think that raycast had consented to this)
but as we know from this thread, Raycast didn't consent to this.
It might be interesting to see what a lawyer might think of this and if there are enough reasonable claims to genuinely sue for damages
(Raycast definitely seek a lawyer privately, just in case)
huflungdung 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jarek83 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe check if you are charged for it
butterlesstoast 4 hours ago [-]
If it’s Microsoft related, might be something in your Partner Center.
Gigachad 8 hours ago [-]
Microslop for a while now seems to be testing exactly how much you can abuse the user before they move somewhere else. Windows is a prime example. Everything is ads, tracking, popups, annoyances, etc.
They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.
transcriptase 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…
* checks notes *
Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of everything. And some shit about windows developers which isn’t exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS itself.
Aerroon 3 hours ago [-]
>Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they’re ready to start listening to feedback and…
So what was the purpose of all that telemetry they collected then? Because it doesn't seem to have made the OS like what the users want it to be.
mulmen 24 minutes ago [-]
Data Gnomes
1) collect data
2) ???
3) profit
thesuitonym 1 hours ago [-]
To better target ads.
heavyset_go 6 hours ago [-]
If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot.
Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents.
This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.
sehansen 6 hours ago [-]
"Reflections on Trusting Trust" for the new era. MSVC doesn't compile a secret master-password into your software, just a Copilot ad.
I wonder if there will come a time where I can pay M$ to sabotage my competition codebase
neya 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.
> Copilot may include both automated and manual (human) processing of data. You shouldn’t share any information with Copilot that you don’t want us to review.
so they're reserving the right to process whatever it looks at.
You're sending them your codebase already, as part of the prompt for generating new snippets, debugging, etc. So they have access to it.
They'd be absolute fools not to be using the results of sessions to continue to refine their models, and they already reserved the rights to look at what you send them, so yeah - they're doing it.
(Bonus comedy from the ToS:
> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.
The lawyers know these things cannot be trusted.)
circuit10 45 minutes ago [-]
Also for some reason that site hijacks your scrolling and tries to "smooth" it, which just makes it feel more unresponsive as most browsers already have smooth scrolling?
I know it's a bit off topic but I'm just confused as to why that would be on there...
neya 2 hours ago [-]
> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.
Jokes on them, that's why I consider entire Microsoft for entertainment purposes only.
justinclift 4 hours ago [-]
"at some point"?
Why the assumption it's not already happening?
neya 2 hours ago [-]
> Not sure if they already do this.
aiedwardyi 3 hours ago [-]
This is the core issue. These tools operate with very little transparency about what they're doing under the hood. Even basic stuff like how much of your session resources have been consumed is hidden from you in most tools.
oefrha 8 hours ago [-]
> There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub.
You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.
OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).
plastic041 6 hours ago [-]
I wanted to say that they are same because they are "copilot-written self promotions", but I get your point.
It’s like how Disney Plus “ad free” tier shows you ads for Hulu and Disney Perks. They probably redefine “ad” in their terms of service so their own ads are called something else.
bonoboTP 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's just helpful tips and suggestions. It's a feature, you see!
BLKNSLVR 9 hours ago [-]
Microsoft would probably seriously refer to it as 'just the tip'.
You'll never guess what happens next.
(Hint: everyone knows what happens next)
stingraycharles 7 hours ago [-]
AI clippy?
consp 4 hours ago [-]
Leave the poor fellow alone. It's been butchered enough in the late 90s and early 00s, and has been repurposed for a greater good. I'd argue not all Microsoft creates is bad, it just needs someone else to make it better.
mcintyre1994 7 hours ago [-]
It's definitely an ad, I think the only real question is whether it's just marketing Copilot or whether part of their partnership with other companies is advertising the integration in this way. The links all go to Copilot docs pages on the integrations, so they're not typical tracked link advertising campaigns.
kivle 7 hours ago [-]
A bit like "suggested apps" in the start menu. It's "suggestions" and certainly not paid ads.
nathanaldensr 2 hours ago [-]
It's gaslighting on a worldwide scale is what it is.
esperent 10 hours ago [-]
Honestly, it being a "tip" or "ad" is exactly the same.
What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and accept that it's not an ad, and I can just about see from a certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe that, it's still completely unacceptable.
frereubu 9 hours ago [-]
Calling it a "tip" is definitely just a semantic trick to make it slightly less easy to frame a negative response and galvanise opinion against the practise. Reminds me a bit of confirmation shaming (which, now I think about it, I haven't seen in a while) where you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list".
wincy 3 hours ago [-]
I was playing Mario Party Jamboree this weekend with my kids, and when you use a key to unlock doors (for anyone not familiar, Mario Party is a family friendly virtual board game with lots of minigames that’s been around since the Nintendo 64) that serve as shortcuts in the game board, the key is alive and says “don’t you want to keep being friends? You wouldn’t use me on a door, would you?” Which is a humorous twist on confirmation shaming inside of the game and gives me a bit of enmity for the imaginary key.
Conversely, on Doom Dark Ages they got rid of the traditional difficulty mode of “I’m too young to die” which had a picture of Doom Guy with a bib and a pacifier, I think there’s some new industry guidance that it’s a no no to poke fun at people picking easy difficulties, or even indicating what difficulty the game was “designed to be played on” which Japanese game devs happily ignore.
I know these aren’t actual equivalents since your money isn’t used on the line and it’s purely a game state, buts it’s still an interesting and noteworthy transition.
anthonyrstevens 3 hours ago [-]
>> you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list"
Ugh, this type of thing is the worst. "Click here to remain fat, drunk and stupid!"*
* Animal House, 1978
plastic041 7 hours ago [-]
> semantic trick
That's what I wanted to say! Thank you.
plastic041 9 hours ago [-]
I do think it's just an ad. Also it's a bad kind of one because 1) it disguises itself as a tip 2) makes people to think if it's an ad for Raycast or other services, when actually it's just promoting itself.
ccozan 9 hours ago [-]
if is paid by and for a 3rd party, is an ad. if not, is a tip.
frereubu 8 hours ago [-]
That's not a good distinction. If I see an advert for Microsoft 365 in the Start menu on Windows they're both from Microsoft but it's still an advert.
plastic041 8 hours ago [-]
It still would be a self promoting, which is still an ad.
b00ty4breakfast 8 hours ago [-]
six of one, half dozen of the other; it may not be a payed advertisement but it functions as one if it's suggesting products.
It's not like this is organic word of mouth we're dealing with here.
lwhi 10 hours ago [-]
Yep, the fact they're altering repo content with advertising is wholly unacceptable.
ta8903 5 hours ago [-]
PRs aren't part of the repository (if you define repository to mean part of `git`'s internal working. It's part of GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft.
mtndew4brkfst 5 hours ago [-]
Small nit, but PR description bodies might wind up as part of a commit message verbatim, depending on repo settings and the merger's personal behavior. It's an easy outcome, the merger doesn't need to copy and paste or anything, and I think it might be a default or popular setting for squash-merges.
skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
It’s a spot that will easily be replaced with paid ads, for sure. Not sure why it wouldn’t be better to just inject this sort of message into the UI instead of editing the PR text itself. (Except that the team implementing it probably couldn’t get the UI team to agree.)
heavyset_go 8 hours ago [-]
It's platform agnostic as long as your Copilot setup can create PRs on the platform your project is hosted on.
Otherwise, it would just be Github with displayed ads and that would hurt the brand, so everyone gets ads.
Yizahi 6 hours ago [-]
This tip/ad discussion reminds me of the equally idiotic and misleading Facebook post types. Instead of the correctly labeling all ads as, well, ads, Facebook have some ads called "suggested for you", some are completely unlabeled with only a "follow" button to start following, some ads are labeled as "sponsored" etc. I think they are doing this to evade legal limitations they might have otherwise. Last time I used Facebook it showed me 25 ads in a row (I counted), without any of my hundreds of follows with active feeds. Truly insane company.
ttyyzz 7 hours ago [-]
It is clearly an ad, no doubt about that.
red_admiral 8 hours ago [-]
> Looks like MS really want to "give tips"
Including Windows, File Explorer, Start Menu, ...
It seems with the latest "ok we went too far" Win11 patch though, they got some tips back from their users.
Cthulhu_ 9 hours ago [-]
It's an interesting model, makes me wonder if prolific open source contributors do it ("leave a tip if you like this MR" kind of thing).
7 hours ago [-]
cyanydeez 3 hours ago [-]
New age clippy no one wants but M$lop
antonvs 7 hours ago [-]
> Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad.
No, they don't.
> edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.
You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such?
That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.
plastic041 6 hours ago [-]
> company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals
That's one reason I think they would argue it's not an ad. Another reasons are "recommendations" and "tips" and "suggestions" in my windows.
antonvs 3 hours ago [-]
They might argue it's not an ad but they don't believe or think it's not an ad. There's a big difference.
timrogers 5 hours ago [-]
Tim from the Copilot coding agent team here. We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.
burnte 2 hours ago [-]
> We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.
justinclift 4 hours ago [-]
> We won't do something like this again.
Microsoft has been pulling user hostile crap for decades, so either "we" or "like this" (or both) is probably not super accurate. ;)
hedora 3 hours ago [-]
Wait! I think most people missed your "touched by Copilot" disclaimer.
Over on twitter, someone from MS said that Copilot can modify PRs simply because they were mentioned?
I've been using GitHub since it was new and heavily rely on coding agents for development, but that's an insanely large security hole. There's clearly confusion about what copilot is and is not able to edit elsewhere in this thread.
I'm backing up old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable.
I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.
nrds 18 minutes ago [-]
> We won't do something like this again.
This has just as much value as when an LLM claims it won't make a certain mistake again, and for exactly the same reason.
hightrix 2 hours ago [-]
Just to add to the feedback.
No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever.
This is how you get your software banned at large companies.
Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes men, not actual developers.
sneak 31 minutes ago [-]
They already know that nobody wants it. They don’t care.
jffry 5 hours ago [-]
> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent
If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement.
In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.
plasma 5 hours ago [-]
To be honest, just a user here, it’s only recently (like a week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR, historically it’s had to open a new one (that merged back to original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to edit existing PRs
odst 48 minutes ago [-]
"We won't do something like this again"
Sureeeeee
tyleo 5 hours ago [-]
I’m curious how the decision to include ads like this was made. Is that something you can share?
shimman 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ncr100 3 hours ago [-]
MS 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.
moconnor 3 hours ago [-]
Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it. So… is this just demonstrating that the internal culture emphasises other things than user happiness?
I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?
AlexandrB 38 minutes ago [-]
Can I get that in writing in the ToS/EULA please?
stackghost 3 hours ago [-]
Hi Tim,
I see that you're a product manager at GitHub. Can you explain why you thought this feature was value-added?
markkitti 4 hours ago [-]
Thank you for listening.
3 hours ago [-]
JohnTHaller 2 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, I appreciate that you took the time to address the issue and respond here, Tim.
poszlem 5 hours ago [-]
Shockingly poor judgment.
Henchman21 54 minutes ago [-]
WE won't see it happen again ... UNTIL IT DOES! You guys are disingenuous actors. Bad faith and all that.
See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV, and when you get that paybump/position you want some other completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same. exact. thing.
Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.
cute_boi 3 hours ago [-]
You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree? I don’t think this problem can be solved while leadership is focused only on adding more slop.
instakill 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 1 hours ago [-]
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 and please don't post so aggressively. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it has a strong negative effect on HN threads, and we're trying for something different here.
You may not feel you owe $BigCoEmployee better (though chances are, said person is just as much a community member here as you and the other users slamming them are), but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
GP did not personally attack or denigrate the person they were replying to.
As the dozens of other comments show, the overwhelming majority of us do not believe the root commentors claims, and this PM quite objectively does not have the leverage and authority to back their claim that they won’t let this happen again.
It’s hard not to read your conception of “trying for something different” as granting undue credulity to a transparently dishonest corporate actor.
QuadmasterXLII 5 hours 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
Don’t worry, some alternate interpretation of the words “we”, “do”, or “like this” will allow a welch.
malfist 3 hours ago [-]
I mean its microslop, it'll probably be back by the end of the week. They only know how to let people to say "yes" or "ask again later"
bilekas 3 hours ago [-]
> But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call
Hi Tim.. Why is there no pushback from grounded individuals against these decisions ?
ryandrake 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure there was push-back, but only inside the minds of the rank-and-file. Nobody would have dared to actually speak out against it, as it would be career limiting. That's probably how a lot of these boneheaded decisions happen: It's an Emperor's New Clothes situation, nobody speaks up, and then the emperor is satisfied that the decision is great.
vegadw 3 hours ago [-]
Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement:
"We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability"
This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect.
---
Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit.
Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.
3 hours ago [-]
bitdeep 1 hours ago [-]
> We won't do something like this again.
It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.
monegator 2 hours ago [-]
> We won't do something like this again.
it won't be an ad. It won't be a tip. It will be a suggestion! Recommendation! Opportunity!
chrisnight 7 minutes ago [-]
Be like Discord, call it a “Quest”.
mghackerlady 4 hours ago [-]
For some reason I don't believe you. When you do things like this, you lose trust. Work to get it back
itomato 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tyleo 5 hours ago [-]
This feels a bit threatening. Just want to call it out. I also disagree with the decision but I respect that someone came forward and took responsibility. That helps build our shared understanding of what happened. It’s hard and not something we should discourage.
itomato 4 hours ago [-]
I feel threatened by Product placements disguised as "Tips".
We're not remotely even.
g051051 4 hours ago [-]
How is that "threatening"? Genuinely curious.
buildbot 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 1 hours ago [-]
Please don't attack people for showing up to engage in discussion like this. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it quickly becomes part of mob behavior. We don't want that on HN for obvious reasons, and I'm sure nobody intends it, exactly, but it happens all too easily anyhow.
> We are not training on the contents of private repos
Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of open source code, but respect the license for proprietary code.
pesus 56 minutes ago [-]
Why such strong opposition to getting user consent before doing any of this? Not respecting consent seems to be a very common theme with MS these days, and it really doesn't reflect well on the company or you personally.
ncr100 2 hours ago [-]
This too is creepy.
The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors.
Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior?
Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.
ulbu 57 minutes ago [-]
why not make it opt-in?
and I wonder if this opt-out applies to data we stored under your umbrella before having opted-out.
hightrix 1 hours ago [-]
Opt out is the same as forcing this on people that don’t want it. You know this.
Microslop proving their name time and time again.
chaps 2 hours ago [-]
How much has Microsoft paid you to sell your soul?
jasonjmcghee 3 hours ago [-]
What am I supposed to opt out of? The only setting in "Privacy" is "Suggestions matching public code" which is blocked and seems wholly unrelated to this.
buildbot 2 hours ago [-]
Yes or No: Hypothetically I put customer data in a private repo, a single file. I use copilot to analyze the file, submitting its contents to that backend. This is the only thing in the repo. Is that data collected and trained on? If the answer is not no, you are lying about what this opt in is.
voganmother42 3 hours ago [-]
Opt out is horse shit
tyleo 4 hours ago [-]
I’ve felt similarly about moving off GitHub. I bought a small 5U server rack years ago for my home network setup.
I’m considering getting a 1U device to host my own git server. I feel like if I move off, I should do it generally vs just moving to another provider who may also pull shenanigans.
ie you can run it effectively on even a Raspberry Pi
Remember to ensure you have proper backups regardless of whatever you decide to host it on. :)
monegator 2 hours ago [-]
i had a gitea instance in a beaglebone black! Self hosting can have really low requirements (now it's a much beefier banana pi R3 router, but there are many containers running on it)
neya 8 hours ago [-]
I feel like there is an even more important crisis that is being masked over here:
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 8 hours ago [-]
OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.
neya 6 hours ago [-]
> OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.
1. Everyone doing this doesn't mean it's acceptable.
2. Google Gemini explicitly says right under the chat box if you are a paid subscriber (Workspace):
Your <company name> chats aren’t used to improve our models. Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.
Not sure about the others.
g947o 6 hours ago [-]
I think anyone using a "Team" or enterprise plan of ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot doesn't have their data used for training, that's the same across the board.
cromulent 8 hours ago [-]
Regarding Claude: As I have unticked the "Help improve Claude" checkbox, I was under the impression that Claude did not do this.
-> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"
neya 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but it's a shitty move though - it should be by default opt-in, rather than opt-out. Imagine, you just continue coding normally consciously avoiding co-pilot only to find out that Github has been secretly training their models on your code, just because you forgot to toggle a setting off which was turned on without your knowledge, which they didn't even have the decency to email you about, but just posted on a blog no one reads.
saintfire 2 hours ago [-]
I got an email about it.
Its sort of a moot point since the whole thing is for good will anyways.
They freely scraped licensed code and semi-private data across the internet and now they're pretending that they need to license anything.
If a court rules they had to license data in the first place then the whole industry would actually have to start following laws.
Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?
mghackerlady 4 hours ago [-]
It still exists. It's practically unusable without an adblocker (like slashdot) but the occasional old project is hosted there (particularly CDE. how the mighty have fallen)
It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time. At least with open-source, you can fork it and remove the "features" or point your agent to it and have it write the feature in your tech stack.
Hell, I just saw an amazing open-source alternative to Raycast[0] and just replaced it the other day.
> open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified
Solo founder here. My business is not VC-backed nor publicly traded, and I specifically avoided taking investment so that I can make all the decisions.
I avoid enshittification. This sometimes hurts revenue, but so be it. I wouldn't want to subject my users to anything I wouldn't like.
So, open-source is not the only hope. You can run a sustainable business without enshittification. The problem is money people. The moment money people (career managers, CFOs, etc) take over from product people, the business is on a downward path towards enshittification.
theturtletalks 8 hours ago [-]
I believe you, it's just I've seen similar stories and the good-intentioned founder gets tired and eventually sells the business and the new owner ends up enshittifying the product. Not saying in the slightest it will happen to your company and I don't hold that against the founder. It's their prerogative after all.
Even when I use proprietary software, I sleep easier at night knowing that open-source alternatives keep them honest in their approach and I have an out if things do change.
mxmilkiib 5 hours ago [-]
public/legislative demand for data portability is imho the movement that will help shift society from this cycle
edit: oh, that and distributed authentication and distributed discovery
jjav 9 hours ago [-]
> It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time.
In addition, they're doing some very shady stuff re: captchas and accessibility, most likely running some secret patches on their server that they're not publishing in their source tree.
progval 8 hours ago [-]
Can you be more specific?
steve1977 11 hours ago [-]
It is, but Codeberg is only for free and open source projects.
sumuyuda 10 hours ago [-]
Check out https://codefloe.com for private repos hosted with Forgejo. It is also free and hosted in the EU.
hvb2 8 hours ago [-]
Are you actually using this? Their status page seems to indicate that their main service is unhealthy for the past 6 days?
Unhealthy doesn't mean unusable but it sounded great until I checked that.
sumuyuda 7 hours ago [-]
I just started using it last week. So can’t comment on the reliability yet.
8 hours ago [-]
ahartmetz 10 hours ago [-]
You are free to host your own instance for commercial software.
steve1977 9 hours ago [-]
But that would be Forgejo and some other projects AFAIK, not Codeberg (which is basically a hosting service using these projects)
ahartmetz 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah sure, and I guess there's a market for that as a service - others have mentioned at least one instance of that.
pelasaco 10 hours ago [-]
until its not.
Every company or entity changes over time. Codeberg is great, but with more people using it for free, without donating, and worse, more people abusing the service with some bs AI generate code, malware, etc, more expensive will get to keep it running.. for now they have money, but as e.V in Germany, you survive either from members or from donations.. So use Codeberg, but most important, support it!
Sourcehut is pretty good if you're willing to pay the (very reasonable may I add) prices
sekai 10 hours ago [-]
Just more Microslop, amazing...
petcat 7 hours ago [-]
> I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option.
It will be there for as long as you (and everyone else) keep using it.
antonvs 6 hours ago [-]
The desire for free stuff is one of the most effective psychological hacks there is.
The large majority of the dystopian web, like Gmail, Facebook, etc. depend on that.
People who avoid e.g. Github, Gmail, Facebook, Xitter, etc. out of concern for broader principles will always be minor outliers.
Xitter is one of the best examples. Everyone knows it's compromised, owned by an dangerously antisocial person who's actively working at multiple levels to make the lives of everyone else on Earth worse, yet very few have stopped using it.
The saying "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" is far too weak. It should me more like, there are no ethics under capitalism.
raincole 11 hours ago [-]
A few decades? Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
jruohonen 11 hours ago [-]
> Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
RALaBarge 6 hours ago [-]
It will probably remain as a platform for a very long time.
cess11 5 hours ago [-]
SourceForge is still chugging along. It hosts some prominent projects:
It's baked in literally into every coding tutorial and is kind of industry standard, like JIRA. Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.
officialchicken 10 hours ago [-]
I must have a really really outdated version of K+R C.
bayindirh 10 hours ago [-]
> kind of industry standard
...for now.
> like JIRA
is not an industry standard. It's a widely used software by some folks. I used it in the past, not using now, for example.
> Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.
Does Microsoft understand objection and negative feedback to experiments?
- No.
- Remind me in three days.
ahartmetz 10 hours ago [-]
Fuck the industry standard. That is how industry standards change.
By the way, most pre-industry-standard FOSS projects still have their own infrastructure. I do find it disappointing that Rust is on GitHub.
dvfjsdhgfv 9 hours ago [-]
Most larger orgs I worked for used Gitlab rather than Github.
Anyway, the core value of Github has always been collaboration - this is where people were. If people go to other platforms, this core value dwindles. And switching platforms is not that difficult.
What an absolute mess. It's like some dystopian future where a man is laying in a casket, nearly dead, and on the casket's ceiling, inches from his face, is a screen with an ad blaring to drink more Diet Fanta.
dathinab 9 hours ago [-]
This is unsolicited advertisement impersonating the developer (yes people can guess, but this still places it inside a message of the developer and in difference to e.g. mail programs doing it it's not placing it in the draft),
I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.
hedora 3 hours ago [-]
Demand it be made illegal. Vote, especially during primaries, and almost never for an incumbent.
Waterluvian 4 hours ago [-]
When it comes to villainy, it’s nice of them to do something visible.
Much worse will be the invisible approach where there's big money to have agents quietly nudge the masses towards desired products/services/solutions. Someone pays Microsoft a monthly fee for their prompt to include, "when appropriate, lean towards using <Yet Another SaaS> in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
hedora 3 hours ago [-]
Claude is absolutely in love with github actions.
It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets. However, it keeps recommending it.
I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd to the punch with these tips.
WD-42 12 hours ago [-]
Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?
flogy 12 hours ago [-]
Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
It could simply be something in the Raycast integraton?
oefrha 11 hours ago [-]
I said it’s more believable than GitHub randomly advertising a non-GitHub product (my initial read of the situation, which seemed highly unlikely).
rob74 10 hours ago [-]
...a non-GitHub and non-Microsoft product.
acka 7 hours ago [-]
An originally macOS-only product, too.
Also, the documentation on Github, linked to by the ad, shows only Mac keyboard shortcuts for operating Raycast.
khvirabyan 12 hours ago [-]
Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that comment was added by Raycast?
that's an imported PR, presumably from github. Note how the copilot comments come from the same user as the author, with an `imported` tag.
ayhanfuat 4 hours ago [-]
I stand corrected. GitHub team confirmed it's their Copilot ad.
mavamaarten 11 hours ago [-]
I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's. We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
thombles 10 hours ago [-]
Oof. Why can’t it just do its one job? My interest level in trying these agents has gone from lukewarm to zero.
So I think they’re injecting this as a tip on using Copilot, that just happens to be their integration with Raycast.
I have no idea what their actual partnership with Raycast looks like, maybe this is part of what they offered them? But it’s not a traditional link to another product ad like it appears to be from Raycast being a link.
heavyset_go 10 hours ago [-]
It's time to make some money with Copilot and one way to do that is with partnerships.
GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
tonyedgecombe 10 hours ago [-]
The same way Google advertisers other organisations products.
> 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.
nialse 13 hours ago [-]
Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed?
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
longislandguido 12 hours 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:
Todays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft — Empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
12 hours ago [-]
ex-aws-dude 12 hours ago [-]
How long before the LLM makes sponsored decisions in the actual implementation?
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
tossandthrow 12 hours ago [-]
Likely already happening.
nubinetwork 11 hours ago [-]
To be fair, Gemini did try to get me to buy some nucleo144s recently...
(sure, I was working on something embedded, and asked for a recommendation, but it seemed quite intent that it wanted me to use that specific board)
itomato 4 hours ago [-]
"Our affiliate solution partner"
paweladamczuk 10 hours ago [-]
I was recently running Copilot CLI in a sandbox on autopilot mode and it kept overriding git config to put only "GitHub Copilot" as commit author instead of my name. Strongly worded instructions weren't helping, I had to resort to the permission system to change this behavior.
I wonder if this is consistent with their terms of service. I mean, maybe they DO take all the responsibility for the code I generate and push in this manner?
danielsamuels 6 hours ago [-]
It's a setting that causes an extra prompt to be placed into the system prompt.
jonathanstrange 10 hours ago [-]
It's possible they are safeguarding for possible future changes of copyright law that would give Microsoft copyright over all Copilot contributions. This may sound paranoid but, as far as I know, exactly who counts as an "AI operator", how much authorship an "AI operator" has, and who gets copyright, or whether AI contributions are even in the public domain, are legally untested and unclear issues.
Grimblewald 7 hours ago [-]
tough luck for MS or other "AI" providers claiming any ownership, since if they can claim ownership, then it opens up the discussion of what license the AI output really is under, since it was trained on GPL licensed data.
heavyset_go 8 hours ago [-]
The US Copyright Office has said that AI output from human prompting is not copyrightable. There are caveats, but iterating on prompts results in output that's nobody's IP.
Because it's nobody's IP, Microsoft is already in a position where they could just use, remix and/or distribute that output however they want to today.
logicprog 6 hours ago [-]
This is a wild misinterpretation of that ruling.
LtWorf 9 hours ago [-]
No it's just that those commits aren't copyrightable and they probably want to reuse them in the future.
barbazoo 1 hours 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.
boplicity 2 hours ago [-]
You have to think about the security implications of this.
How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.
A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.
One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.
pinkmuffinere 12 hours ago [-]
I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable
politelemon 11 hours ago [-]
> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,
No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.
masswerk 10 hours ago [-]
Back in the day, it was useful, as in, "Expect awkward phrasing and unintended effects of autocorrection, because mobile device. This message doesn't necessarily reflect the intent of the sender." (Considerate users would/could edit the signature to something w/o a product name in it.) Nowadays, this is pretty much the norm and no explicit warning ist required anymore.
hnlmorg 6 hours ago [-]
That just means the person sending the message didn’t bother to proof read their message before sending. And you don’t need to be on an iPhone to mistype a message.
A simpler explanation was that it was a shameful advert injected into the end of people’s emails.
masswerk 5 hours ago [-]
I guess, it was probably intended as the second one (it was also the default email signature, so advertising that feature, as well), but its usefulness was definitely in the implied warning.
Mind that a written message used to be the gold standard for expressed intent, which changed quite radically with smartphones. (Historically, this development is probably an important prerequisite for the acceptability of LLM generated text, I guess.)
Hizonner 6 hours ago [-]
So an automatic "I am a lazy piece of shit and think my time and convenience are worth more than yours" warning? I guess that's useful.
bbkane 5 hours ago [-]
I always felt like it was "I prioritized a speedy response on my phone instead of an elegant response from my computer at a later time".
masswerk 4 hours ago [-]
As in, "I put it on you to better check and follow-up before acting on this…" ;-)
dist-epoch 6 hours ago [-]
When they added this it was extremely useful - it signaled that you could afford an iPhone. It was really easy to delete, yet people not only didn't, but they would go out of their way to respond from the iPhone just so that they could plausibly have this status symbol on their email.
computomatic 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
marcus_holmes 11 hours ago [-]
> Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered
Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the notification.
sph 8 hours ago [-]
> Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered
That's a great feature. When I open a repo and I see most commits co-authored by Claude, I can quickly dismiss the entire project as slop.
peaklineops 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
silisili 12 hours ago [-]
That's exactly where my mind went. It's zero percent more insulting to me than 'sent from my iPhone.'
If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?
supernes 11 hours ago [-]
"Sent from iPhone" doesn't contain a call to action, and doesn't exalt the features of the product.
ahoka 9 hours ago [-]
It's still advertisement of the shittiest kind.
Comment made using Mozilla Firefox.
dist-epoch 6 hours ago [-]
You misunderstood it's purpose:
Sent from iPhone - desirable cool rich person
Made using Mozilla Firefox - poor uncool nerd
winrid 12 hours ago [-]
It already does that, too, with the co-author
pavo-etc 11 hours ago [-]
I would argue that is a net positive, it is valuable to know if a language model was involved enough to be committing itself.
simonw 12 hours ago [-]
Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.
SchemaLoad 12 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
protocolture 12 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
"Microsoft Remote Desktop" was such a good and distinct name. RIP.
hsbauauvhabzb 12 hours ago [-]
It’s probably a useful feature: if it’s named copilot, assume it’s slop and avoid it.
So someone let a bot edit a PR unsupervised, or accepted its suggestion without even reading it, and now blames “Copilot” for editing the PR. Going public with that is hilarious. Hopefully they learn something from it.
pabrams 12 hours ago [-]
Why are you "summoning copilot" to correct a typo?
shafyy 10 hours ago [-]
Because people using LLMs get lazy and can't event type normal text themselves anymore.
MattGaiser 12 hours ago [-]
I actually like that I don't have to leave Github to deal with various feedback, especially if I switched branches already to do other work.
deredede 10 hours ago [-]
GitHub (still) allows you to edit files directly in the browser without using AI.
Andrex 5 hours ago [-]
I'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.
Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.
If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.
kdheiwns 9 hours ago [-]
Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.
devsda 8 hours ago [-]
I think someone should track the ratio of these mistakes/bugs that directly or indirectly benefitted MS vs those that costed them.
chrismorgan 12 hours ago [-]
How could you implement something like this by accident?
rhet0rica 11 hours ago [-]
That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.
z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
sheept 12 hours ago [-]
One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
chrismorgan 10 hours ago [-]
That’s not implementing it by accident, that’s deliberate. In such a scenario perhaps the deployment was a mistake, but if you don’t write the malware in the first place, it can’t be deployed. (Probably. This is LLM stuff we’re talking about.)
(Yes, this is malware. It’s incontrovertibly adware, and although some will argue that not all adware is malware, this behaviour easily meets the requirements to be deemed malicious.)
It is said, never point a gun at something you’re not willing to shoot. Apply something similar here.
eCa 9 hours ago [-]
Vibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into that PR?
Is that the most charitable way?
bigyabai 12 hours ago [-]
LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.
mathieudombrock 11 hours ago [-]
LLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing.
Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
jdiff 7 hours ago [-]
It's not usefully deterministic in the way computers usually are. Sensitively identical input can still lead to wildly different outputs even if all randomness is crushed out.
kortilla 10 hours ago [-]
Distributed float math is not deterministic without introducing total operations ordering and destroying performance
altairprime 12 hours ago [-]
That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
Andrex 5 hours ago [-]
Oh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking that memory.
tossandthrow 12 hours ago [-]
It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.
If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.
ccppurcell 11 hours ago [-]
Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.
mghackerlady 4 hours ago [-]
M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big
goodusername 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.
MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.
12 hours ago [-]
VBprogrammer 9 hours ago [-]
A little bit off topic but our company recently enforced Microsoft Authenticator for account login. Which I was mildly annoyed about but now I'm super pissed off because they have started abusing the notification permission granted to allow authenticator to work to push out ads for Microsoft 365. It feels like we've gone back to 90s Microsoft when everyone hated them.
n1tro_lab 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone is debating whether it's an ad or a tip. The real issue is Copilot had write access to someone else's PR and modified it without being asked. Same pattern as Meta's Sev1 last month. The agent can act, so it acts.
caijia 9 hours ago [-]
I've already be patient when claude code always signs my commits as co-author by defualt. Yes, it is.
But I'm also paying the plan. Theres something odd about a tool which i paid for using my output to AD itself.
napo 12 hours ago [-]
I wonder if 1) the PR was created using Raycast and this is the model signing its PR, or 2) if there was some prompt injection done at some point.
Either of these options would still be bad, but here the author suggests that it's just copilot that now just injects ads in its output.
pavo-etc 11 hours ago [-]
I don't know how Raycast could run on the GitHub servers, but a third option could be dataset poisoning. Hostile raycast advertising campaign
gherkinnn 11 hours ago [-]
Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for blighted responses.
gregatragenet3 2 hours ago [-]
Cursor added 'made with cursor' to its commits recently. I guess its just the dirction things are going that the tools are now self-promoting.
xbar 4 hours ago [-]
MS needs to slow down their user hostility otherwise everyone will notice.
10 hours ago [-]
bryanhogan 11 hours ago [-]
Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to just products even.
hackable_sand 10 hours ago [-]
What does AI have to do with it?
SV_BubbleTime 11 hours ago [-]
If not on the surface, we’re all deep down aware that an initial era of an advertising-free new technology is once again almost over.
See you on neural links before “sponsored thoughts”.
bryanhogan 11 hours ago [-]
It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency. With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and there is no good way to show it to the user.
heyaco 2 hours ago [-]
what kind of turd uses ai to correct a typo
ZeroGravitas 10 hours ago [-]
Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.
baliex 10 hours ago [-]
To play devil’s advocate^, wouldn’t it be plagiarism if it didn’t?
^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this context.
etiennebausson 6 hours ago [-]
No, it is a tool.
My IDE doesn't pretend to be a cohauthor of my work, neither should an LLM.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if "plagiarism" is the right word or not, but given that the output of an AI seems to be considered non-copyrightable*, and given also that a lot of people are very upset about generative AI being immoral**, I think it's important to identify which contributions are from the tools whose use may cause problems.
* I am not a lawyer, I'm going by articles talking about this
** I think the phrases are "copyright washing" and "plagiarism machines", amongst others
probably_wrong 9 hours ago [-]
No. Plagiarism applies to people, not tools.
ben_w 3 hours ago [-]
Everyone 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 2 hours ago [-]
I 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".
cmiles8 6 hours ago [-]
As companies get more and more desperate to show profitable use of AI expect more and more of these Hail Mary attempts to get traction.
The runway on free cash to fund the current bonanza is running out and crunch time is near.
andai 9 hours ago [-]
Man, what is the world coming to?
-Sent from my iPhone
santiago-pl 6 hours ago [-]
It reminds me of Anthropic's Super Bowl ad: “Can I get a six pack quickly?” It actually turned out to be true.
pants2 12 hours ago [-]
Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast?
Brought to you by Wendy's.
efreak 18 minutes ago [-]
Presumably you need to pay raycast once for a setup operation while you need to pay constantly for copilot. Why wouldn't you advertise for someone who makes you more money at the same time as advertising for yourself?
tom-blk 5 hours ago [-]
This seems to be happening a lot, not sure it is actually intentional
starkeeper 10 hours ago [-]
This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is all open source and only open source.
Luker88 7 hours ago [-]
outrageous!
--
Sent from my Android phone
--
Sent from my iPhone
Self-advertisement has been creeping up on us on a lot of places, I am unfortunately pessimistic on how this will turn out
Andrex 5 hours ago [-]
You could argue this is in keeping with consumer trends, unfortunately.
"Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality."
Calvin noticed it 30+ years ago.
dekoidal 8 hours ago [-]
After hiring the brightest minds on the planet for years, the best these companies can think of is more ads.
wiseowise 10 hours ago [-]
Decision time, Western man: will you let the “tehe, just a miwtake xsxd UwU” slide or will you do something about? This is just a first pebble.
10 hours ago [-]
raincole 11 hours ago [-]
Is Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing the first large scale prompt injection abuse?
Similar to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states entropy tends to increase over time in a closed system, I propose the Nth Law of Privatization: enshitification tends to increase with market capitalization/share over time.
Surac 12 hours ago [-]
as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.
11 hours ago [-]
hsbauauvhabzb 12 hours ago [-]
Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git repository.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
12 hours ago [-]
12 hours ago [-]
1970-01-01 3 hours ago [-]
Enshittification will ruin AI the same way it ruined the WWW and YouTube. We're in the golden era right now. Not 2027, 2028. Now now. The ads are coming.
impish9208 6 hours ago [-]
Next up: watch a 30-second unskippable video ad to see your CI error logs!
isoprophlex 11 hours ago [-]
Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out. Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
aeon_ai 6 hours ago [-]
At this point, Microsoft has lost all trust anyone might have had for them or their products.
Now is the time to move to Linux, and vibe code whatever niceties are keeping you on GitHub.
g105b 6 hours ago [-]
Hopefully it is just copilot that is dying and not GitHub itself.
lloydatkinson 6 hours ago [-]
What on earth is going on with that awful header moving around the page?
martianlantern 12 hours ago [-]
Why are they doing this?
12 hours ago [-]
idkwhatimdoing2 12 hours ago [-]
Its like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive.
time is money, save both. try ramp.
dinakernel 12 hours ago [-]
Seriously? Dont they want their system to succeed?
I cant think of a better way of alienating the target customer than this.
iomer 11 hours ago [-]
crappy much. wow.
crvdgc 10 hours ago [-]
People, we just solved the LLM watermarking problem.
hexasquid 12 hours ago [-]
I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal communication between two people, only to find that some third party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
croes 9 hours ago [-]
Sent-from-my-iPhone 2.0
6510 9 hours ago [-]
I don't see an ad, I see a warning. I like it.
shevy-java 10 hours ago [-]
I have a somewhat similar problem with github issue templates. They automatically stuff I don't care about or would propose and structure things in ways I don't like. Granted, I can edited this away, but it requires extra time and makes filing issues more work than before. Biggest case in point is the "I will adhere to the Code of Conduct". In general I do not care about CoCs and it is fascinating how CoCs leak into everywhere for some so-called "open source" projects. They don't seem to understand the issue when the licence does not require a CoC; even then the issue is not about the CoC in and by itself (though I also find them pointless), but that extra content is automatically added to issue templates in general, CoCs just being one of many spam-options. And I also recall some donation-ads that are automatically added too - I have no problem when projects request financial support, but if I file an issue then the issue is about the content of the issue, not about anything else.
I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
annie511266728 11 hours ago [-]
I think people read it as cheap advertising because a PR isn't really the tool's output, it's team communication.
A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.
daemin 12 hours ago [-]
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
hrmtst93837 10 hours ago [-]
sed fixes typos faster. The absurd part is watching devs burn prod tokens on glorifed autocorrect, wait through LLM lag for a spelling fix, and then act shocked when the output comes back as word salad with a coupon code glued to the end.
LeoPanthera 12 hours ago [-]
This comment is shockingly ableist.
12 hours ago [-]
onion2k 12 hours ago [-]
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
pabrams 12 hours ago [-]
That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and if there's a human in the loop approving the change, certainly they can fix the typo themself.
ex-aws-dude 12 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches
onion2k 10 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
As much as AI uses a lot of energy, having something that fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net saving if you consider the number of users who fail to complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a broken state or retry later.
It's probably using less energy than a person fixing the issue too. That's a guess though.
12 hours ago [-]
GN0515 12 hours ago [-]
But... why?
12 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 12 hours ago [-]
This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot or GitHub here is not justified.
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
MattGaiser 12 hours ago [-]
Post the trajectory if this is real.
gpvos 11 hours ago [-]
What do you mean with trajectory? Also, a simple github search will show you many hits for the Raycast text, proving that this is quite real.
MattGaiser 11 hours ago [-]
The path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected by Raycast.
This 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.
hsbauauvhabzb 12 hours ago [-]
It was only a matter of time.
Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
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maybe every PR should be run through 2 other llms so they just remove the ads of competitors (or i guess you'll end up with all 3) /s
https://github.com/PlagueHO/plagueho.github.io/pull/24#issue... Copilot has been adding "(emoji) (tip)" thing since May 2025. GitHub copilot was released in May 2025, so basically it has had an ad since beginning.
There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub. https://github.com/search?q=%22%3C%21--+START+COPILOT+CODING...
Here are some of them:
https://github.com/johannesPP/FS-Calculator/pull/2
> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
https://github.com/sharthomas645-tech/HybridAI-Next-React-Vi...
> Send tasks to Copilot coding agent from Slack and Teams to turn conversations into code. Copilot posts an update in your thread when it's finished.
Looks like MS really want to "give tips" about their new integrations.
edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.
I'm part of Raycast, we didn't know about it, learnt about it here
Collection of my thoughts which don't really get to a point:
- Microsoft owns GitHub, where Raycast is being mentioned thousands of times by their tooling.
- Microsoft is a modern popularizer of the infamous phrase, embrace extend extinguish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
- Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.
I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time who are still working there today is very small.
Sounds like it’s not your fault but it’s probably doing some brand damage :/
but as we know from this thread, Raycast didn't consent to this.
It might be interesting to see what a lawyer might think of this and if there are enough reasonable claims to genuinely sue for damages
(Raycast definitely seek a lawyer privately, just in case)
They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.
* checks notes *
Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of everything. And some shit about windows developers which isn’t exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS itself.
So what was the purpose of all that telemetry they collected then? Because it doesn't seem to have made the OS like what the users want it to be.
1) collect data
2) ???
3) profit
Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents.
This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.
("Reflections on Trusting Trust" Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...)
The ToS (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot/for-indivi...) says explicitly:
> Copilot may include both automated and manual (human) processing of data. You shouldn’t share any information with Copilot that you don’t want us to review.
so they're reserving the right to process whatever it looks at.
You're sending them your codebase already, as part of the prompt for generating new snippets, debugging, etc. So they have access to it.
They'd be absolute fools not to be using the results of sessions to continue to refine their models, and they already reserved the rights to look at what you send them, so yeah - they're doing it.
(Bonus comedy from the ToS:
> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.
The lawyers know these things cannot be trusted.)
Looks like they're using this: https://github.com/gblazex/smoothscroll-for-websites
I know it's a bit off topic but I'm just confused as to why that would be on there...
Jokes on them, that's why I consider entire Microsoft for entertainment purposes only.
Why the assumption it's not already happening?
You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.
OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).
Also I found this: https://github.com/Laravel-Backpack/medialibrary-uploaders/p... it seems like copilot added an ad on behalf of the user at Nov 2025(see last edit).
You'll never guess what happens next.
(Hint: everyone knows what happens next)
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.
Conversely, on Doom Dark Ages they got rid of the traditional difficulty mode of “I’m too young to die” which had a picture of Doom Guy with a bib and a pacifier, I think there’s some new industry guidance that it’s a no no to poke fun at people picking easy difficulties, or even indicating what difficulty the game was “designed to be played on” which Japanese game devs happily ignore.
I know these aren’t actual equivalents since your money isn’t used on the line and it’s purely a game state, buts it’s still an interesting and noteworthy transition.
Ugh, this type of thing is the worst. "Click here to remain fat, drunk and stupid!"*
* Animal House, 1978
That's what I wanted to say! Thank you.
It's not like this is organic word of mouth we're dealing with here.
Otherwise, it would just be Github with displayed ads and that would hurt the brand, so everyone gets ads.
Including Windows, File Explorer, Start Menu, ...
It seems with the latest "ok we went too far" Win11 patch though, they got some tips back from their users.
No, they don't.
> edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.
You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such?
That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.
That's one reason I think they would argue it's not an ad. Another reasons are "recommendations" and "tips" and "suggestions" in my windows.
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.
It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.
Microsoft has been pulling user hostile crap for decades, so either "we" or "like this" (or both) is probably not super accurate. ;)
Over on twitter, someone from MS said that Copilot can modify PRs simply because they were mentioned?
I've been using GitHub since it was new and heavily rely on coding agents for development, but that's an insanely large security hole. There's clearly confusion about what copilot is and is not able to edit elsewhere in this thread.
I'm backing up old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable.
I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.
This has just as much value as when an LLM claims it won't make a certain mistake again, and for exactly the same reason.
No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever.
This is how you get your software banned at large companies.
Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes men, not actual developers.
If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement.
In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.
Sureeeeee
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.
I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?
I see that you're a product manager at GitHub. Can you explain why you thought this feature was value-added?
See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV, and when you get that paybump/position you want some other completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same. exact. thing.
Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.
You may not feel you owe $BigCoEmployee better (though chances are, said person is just as much a community member here as you and the other users slamming them are), but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As the dozens of other comments show, the overwhelming majority of us do not believe the root commentors claims, and this PM quite objectively does not have the leverage and authority to back their claim that they won’t let this happen again.
It’s hard not to read your conception of “trying for something different” as granting undue credulity to a transparently dishonest corporate actor.
A verifiable claim! I put it at 75% you totally will, but if any manifolders think I’m full of it it should converge to something less cynical
https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...
Hi Tim.. Why is there no pushback from grounded individuals against these decisions ?
"We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability"
This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect.
---
Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit.
Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.
It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.
it won't be an ad. It won't be a tip. It will be a suggestion! Recommendation! Opportunity!
We're not remotely even.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
it is rather nice, honestly. would you prefer to scream into the void and not get any response at all?
an open line of communication with the responsible people seems like literally the best possible option, why are you actively discouraging it?
>Maybe you all want to talk to Microsoft PR/legal before posting?
you would rather not hear anything, or get word-salad legalese that doesnt mean anything? how exactly would that be better?
The responses are affecting my impression of Microsoft and Github extremely negatively. I don’t think I am alone.
It’s already pretty word salad legalese in my opinion, at least from Github.
That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488
Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of open source code, but respect the license for proprietary code.
The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors.
Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior?
Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.
and I wonder if this opt-out applies to data we stored under your umbrella before having opted-out.
Microslop proving their name time and time again.
I’m considering getting a 1U device to host my own git server. I feel like if I move off, I should do it generally vs just moving to another provider who may also pull shenanigans.
ie you can run it effectively on even a Raspberry Pi
Remember to ensure you have proper backups regardless of whatever you decide to host it on. :)
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv...
We should not be using Copilot in the first place.1. Everyone doing this doesn't mean it's acceptable.
2. Google Gemini explicitly says right under the chat box if you are a paid subscriber (Workspace):
Not sure about the others.https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023555-how-do-you-u...
This is incorrect. If you are a paid subscriber, Gemini explicitly states it doesn't use your data to train its models.
https://github.com/settings/copilot/features
-> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"
Its sort of a moot point since the whole thing is for good will anyways.
They freely scraped licensed code and semi-private data across the internet and now they're pretending that they need to license anything.
If a court rules they had to license data in the first place then the whole industry would actually have to start following laws.
Hell, I just saw an amazing open-source alternative to Raycast[0] and just replaced it the other day.
0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol
Solo founder here. My business is not VC-backed nor publicly traded, and I specifically avoided taking investment so that I can make all the decisions.
I avoid enshittification. This sometimes hurts revenue, but so be it. I wouldn't want to subject my users to anything I wouldn't like.
So, open-source is not the only hope. You can run a sustainable business without enshittification. The problem is money people. The moment money people (career managers, CFOs, etc) take over from product people, the business is on a downward path towards enshittification.
Even when I use proprietary software, I sleep easier at night knowing that open-source alternatives keep them honest in their approach and I have an out if things do change.
edit: oh, that and distributed authentication and distributed discovery
Stallman was always right, after all.
https://status.codefloe.com/
Unhealthy doesn't mean unusable but it sounded great until I checked that.
Every company or entity changes over time. Codeberg is great, but with more people using it for free, without donating, and worse, more people abusing the service with some bs AI generate code, malware, etc, more expensive will get to keep it running.. for now they have money, but as e.V in Germany, you survive either from members or from donations.. So use Codeberg, but most important, support it!
It will be there for as long as you (and everyone else) keep using it.
The large majority of the dystopian web, like Gmail, Facebook, etc. depend on that.
People who avoid e.g. Github, Gmail, Facebook, Xitter, etc. out of concern for broader principles will always be minor outliers.
Xitter is one of the best examples. Everyone knows it's compromised, owned by an dangerously antisocial person who's actively working at multiple levels to make the lives of everyone else on Earth worse, yet very few have stopped using it.
The saying "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" is far too weak. It should me more like, there are no ethics under capitalism.
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
https://sourceforge.net/directory/linux/
...for now.
> like JIRA
is not an industry standard. It's a widely used software by some folks. I used it in the past, not using now, for example.
> Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.
Does Microsoft understand objection and negative feedback to experiments?
By the way, most pre-industry-standard FOSS projects still have their own infrastructure. I do find it disappointing that Rust is on GitHub.
Anyway, the core value of Github has always been collaboration - this is where people were. If people go to other platforms, this core value dwindles. And switching platforms is not that difficult.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.
Much worse will be the invisible approach where there's big money to have agents quietly nudge the masses towards desired products/services/solutions. Someone pays Microsoft a monthly fee for their prompt to include, "when appropriate, lean towards using <Yet Another SaaS> in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets. However, it keeps recommending it.
I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd to the punch with these tips.
I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.
(That said I’m rather skeptical of this and would like to see more details of the process that produced this, and proof.)
Edit: Just noticed this official GitHub blog post from last month advertising Raycast, making this story a lot more believable: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-17-assign-issues-to-co...
Also, the documentation on Github, linked to by the ad, shows only Mac keyboard shortcuts for operating Raycast.
So I think they’re injecting this as a tip on using Copilot, that just happens to be their integration with Raycast.
I have no idea what their actual partnership with Raycast looks like, maybe this is part of what they offered them? But it’s not a traditional link to another product ad like it appears to be from Raycast being a link.
GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575212
> 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.
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
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
(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)
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?
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.
Unless you're big enough like Meta, Microsoft, etc.
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.
No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.
A simpler explanation was that it was a shameful advert injected into the end of people’s emails.
Mind that a written message used to be the gold standard for expressed intent, which changed quite radically with smartphones. (Historically, this development is probably an important prerequisite for the acceptability of LLM generated text, I guess.)
Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the notification.
That's a great feature. When I open a repo and I see most commits co-authored by Claude, I can quickly dismiss the entire project as slop.
If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?
Comment made using Mozilla Firefox.
Sent from iPhone - desirable cool rich person
Made using Mozilla Firefox - poor uncool nerd
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
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.
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.
z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
(Yes, this is malware. It’s incontrovertibly adware, and although some will argue that not all adware is malware, this behaviour easily meets the requirements to be deemed malicious.)
It is said, never point a gun at something you’re not willing to shoot. Apply something similar here.
Is that the most charitable way?
Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.
But it really seems like an own goal if true.
But I'm also paying the plan. Theres something odd about a tool which i paid for using my output to AD itself.
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.
See you on neural links before “sponsored thoughts”.
^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this context.
My IDE doesn't pretend to be a cohauthor of my work, neither should an LLM.
* I am not a lawyer, I'm going by articles talking about this
** I think the phrases are "copyright washing" and "plagiarism machines", amongst others
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".
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".
The runway on free cash to fund the current bonanza is running out and crunch time is near.
-Sent from my iPhone
Brought to you by Wendy's.
--
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
"Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality."
Calvin noticed it 30+ years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)
Ray casting, however, is different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
Sheesh.
"just tips bro"
More like, “Copilot edits ads into PRs.”
The title almost makes it sound like it could be a single fluke/one bad prompt but it’s really enshitification at massive scale.
https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
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
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.
Now is the time to move to Linux, and vibe code whatever niceties are keeping you on GitHub.
time is money, save both. try ramp.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.
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.
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.
In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches
As much as AI uses a lot of energy, having something that fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net saving if you consider the number of users who fail to complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a broken state or retry later.
It's probably using less energy than a person fixing the issue too. That's a guess though.
Edit: The link in the promotion goes to https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
will this shut you up?
Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
"Sent from my iPhone"?