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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

#371
In case people missed it in the other thread, GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...

> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#372

I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads in their PRs. >Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe. Sometimes AI can be right.

Which product called Copilot did you ask?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#373

It's the same with Claude Code actually, and recently Codex too... Claude never used to do this but at some point it started adding itself by default as a co-author on every commit. Literally, in the last week, Codex started making all it's branches as "codex-feature-name", and will continue to do so, even if you tell it to never do that again. Really, really annoying.

That Codex one comes from the new `github` plugin, which includes a `github:yeet` skill. There are several ways to disable it: you can disconnect github from codex entirely, or uninstall the plugin, or add this to your config.toml: [[skills.config]] name = "github:yeet" enabled = false I agree that skill is too opinionated as written, with effects beyond just creating branches.

What's weird is, I never installed any github plugins, or indeed any customization to Codex, other than updating using brew... so I was so confused when this started happening.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#374
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course they already do this. 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 gen…

> Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.

Jokes on them, that's why I consider entire Microsoft for entertainment purposes only.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#375
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"at some point"? Why the assumption it's not already happening?

> Not sure if they already do this.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#376
post #372

I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads in their PRs. >Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe. Sometimes AI can be right.

Which product called Copilot did you ask?

Maybe this one?

https://copilot.microsoft.com/

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#377
post #361

I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads in their PRs. >Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe. Sometimes AI can be right.

It’s not really ads, it’s more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.

I agree. It's not an advertisement, it's simply a piece of information about your particular choice of technology.

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Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#378

The ads are annoying, and I'm glad Microsoft will stop doing it. One thing I do like, however, is how agents add themselves as co-authors in commit messages. Having a signal for which commits are by hand and which are by agent is very useful, both for you and in aggregate (to see how well you are wielding AI, and the quality of the code being generated). Even when I edit the commit message, I still leave in the Claud…

So, philosophically speaking, I agree with this approach. But I did read that there was some speculation regarding the future legal implications of signalling that an AI wrote/cowrote a commit. I know Anthropic's been pretty clear that we own the generated code, but if a copyright lawsuit goes sideways (since these were all built with pirated data and licensed code) — does that open you or your company up to litigation risk in the future?

And selfishly — I'd rather not run into a scenario where my boss pulls up GitHub, sees Claude credited for hundreds of commits, and then he impulsively decides that perhaps Claude's doing the real work here and that we could downsize our dev team or replace with cheaper, younger developers.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#379

I actually love these ads and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author. Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away. I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to label themselves, honestly. I’m not against AI coding tools, but I would like to know when someone is tryin…

> […] and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author. > Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away. I was doing the opposite when using ChatGPT. Specifically manually setting the git commit author as ChatGPT complete with model used, and setting myself as committer. That way I (and e…

> Why would I commit something written by AI as myself?

I don't use any paid AI models (for all my usecases, free models usually work really well) and so for some small scripts/prototypes, I usually just use even sometimes the gemini model but aistudio.google.com is good one too.

I then sometimes, manually paste it and just hit enter.

These are prototypes though, although I build in public. Mostly done for experimental purpoess.

I am not sure how many people might be doing the same though.

But in some previous projects I have had projects stating "made by gemini" etc.

maybe I should write commit message/description stating AI has written this but I really like having the msg be something relevant to the creation of file etc. and there is also the fact that github copilot itself sometimes generate them for you so you have to manually remove it if you wish to change what the commit says.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#380
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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