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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

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Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#261

Post by jffry »

timrogers wrote: post #250

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. W…

> 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.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#263

Post by ta8903 »

lwhi wrote: post #145
esperent wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, the fact they're altering repo content with advertising is wholly unacceptable.

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.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#264

Post by neya »

chimpanzee2 wrote: post #236
neya wrote: post #182

I feel like there is an even more important crisis that is being masked over here: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv... New Section J — AI features, training, and your data: We’ve added a dedicated section that brings all AI-related terms together in one place. Unless you opt out, you grant GitHub and our affiliates a license to collect and use your inputs (e.g., prompts and code context) a…

Looks like you can disable it though: https://github.com/settings/copilot/features -> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"

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.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#265

Post by delfinom »

tyleo wrote: post #251
mathieudutour wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this. I'm part of Raycast, we didn't know about it, learnt about it here

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 :/

They should probably get a lawyer to send a C&D.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#266

Post by plasma »

jffry wrote: post #261
timrogers wrote: post #250

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. W…

> 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 w…

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

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#268

Post by buildbot »

timrogers wrote: post #250

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. W…

[flagged]

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#269

Post by Andrex »

altairprime wrote: post #13
post_below wrote: post #10

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.

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.

Oh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking that memory.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#270

Post by tyleo »

itomato wrote: post #258
timrogers wrote: post #250

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. W…

[flagged]

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.
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