Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features • Hacker News Board

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#91

Post by tempodox » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

That’s what you get for making yourself dependent on profit-driven entities on a one-sided basis (namely that they have all the power and you have all the risk). Of course they will force the stuff on you that they hope will make them the most profit, up to the limit where you’d eat the switching costs and run away.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#92

Post by dboreham » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #17

airstrike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting. And git lives on regardless of GitHub

> There is no law against that Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.

[flagged]

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#93

Post by dboreham » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

api wrote: post #88

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not old enough for MongoDB? Big Data?

I lived through that but it wasn’t like this. Hype isn’t the same thing as having something rammed down your throat with constant nag pop ups and dark patterns.

It's more like the pop-under era.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#94

Post by zzzeek » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:08 PM UTC

can someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos?

it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#95

Post by mhh__ » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

I bet this was true of computers back in the day too. The processes that are native to computers are magical but adding computers to the old is actually quite bad e.g. paperwork is better done on paper

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#96

Post by marginalia_nu » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:10 PM UTC

api wrote: post #90

marginalia_nu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KPIs are likely the missing part of the puzzle. CEO wants AI engagement to go up, organization makes AI engagement go up. If users don't want to engage with new AI features, the new AI features become unavoidable so that engagement goes up despite user preferences. KPIs are a fantastic way for an organization to lose any touch with reality and can drive some truly bizarre decision-making.

Ahh, the reason we lost the Vietnam war. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

"AI is the Vietnam of product management" is a blog post that almost writes itself. Not really my field so if anyone wants to take it for a spin, go ham.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#97

Post by Rover222 » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

chubot wrote: post #72

tho2342o349423 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% p…

They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going. Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago. Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit. In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It se…

Not really your main point, but Tesla self driving is quite incredible, despite what internet clickbait says. They have a clear path to full autonomy with vision-only systems.

But yeah, certainly 5-7 years behind the initial schedule. Which I guess was more of your point.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#98

Post by stavros » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #25

gchamonlive wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even though you are right, that misses the point terribly. It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform. Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community. It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process j…

While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place. As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.

People will respond to incentives. They had an incentive to host their code in a place that easily let them do things that were extremely high friction before.

People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship. People like using easy things, and they like making money. This means that people will make easy things so other people will give them money. If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#99

Post by rossdavidh » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #86

AlexandrB wrote: post #44

I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors t…

From Dan Luu ( https://danluu.com/wat/ ): > When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I w…

All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.

Re: Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

#100

Post by diggan » Sat, Sep 06, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

jraph wrote: post #71

diggan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.

> we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).…

> I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.

Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).

I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.