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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

431–440 of 704 posts

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#431

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…

I just submitted my first Claude authored application to Github and noticed this. I actually like it, although anthropomorphizing my coding tools seems a bit weird, it also provides a transparent way for others to weigh the quality of the code. It didn’t even strike me as relevant to hide it, so I’d not exactly call it lazy, rather ask why bother pretending in first place?

Looking back, it would have been neat to have more metadata in my old Git commits. Were there any differences when I was writing with IntelliJ vs VSCode?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#432
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.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#433
post #427
post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite see the benefit of this, personally. Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it? The quality+understanding bar shouldn't change just because "oh idk claude wrote this part". You don't get extra leeway just because you saved your own time writing the code - that fact doesn't benefit me/the proj…

As a reviewer, I do care. Sure, people should be reviewing Claude-generated code, but they aren't scrutinizing it. Claude-generated code is sufficient—it works, it's decent quality—but it still isn't the same as human written code. It's just minor things, like redundant comments that waste context down the road, tests that don't test what they claim to test, or React components that reimplement everything from scratc…

I agree with a lot of this, but thats kind of my point: if all these things (poor tests, non-DRY, redundant comments, etc) were true about a piece of purely human-written code then I would reject it just the same, so whats the difference? Likewise, if claude solely produced some really clean, concise and rigorously thought-through and testsed piece of code with a human backer then why wouldn't I take it?

As you allude to (and i agree), any non-trivial quantity of code, if SOLELY written by claude will probably be low-quality, but this is apparent whether I know its AI beforehand or not.

I am admittedly coming at this as much more of an AI-hater than many, but I still don't really get why I'd care about how-much or how-little you used AI as a standalone metric.

The people who are using AI "well" are the ones producing code where you'd never even guess it involved AI. I'm sure theres linux kernel maintainers using claude here and there, its not like they expect to have their patches merged because "oh well i just used claude here don't worry about that part".

(But also yes, of course I'm not going to talk to claude about your PR, I will only talk to you, the human contributor, and if you don't know whats up with the PR then into the trash it goes!)

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#434
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 be…

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.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#435
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. -------------- Sent from HackerNews Supreme™ - the best way to browse the Y Combinator Hacker News. Now on macOS, Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and SONY BRAVIA Smart TV. Prices starting at €13.99 per month, billed yearly. https://hacker-news-supreme.io

Domain available for $50 from Cloudflare

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you review a juniors code, do you commit it under your name?

A junior is a person. A tool is a tool. Do you credit your text editor with authorship?

If it contributed significantly to the design and execution, and was a major contributing factor yes. Would you say a reserve parachute saved your life or would you say you saved your own life? What about the maker of the parachute?

I'd be thanking the reserve and the people who made it, and credit myself with the small action of slightly moving my hand as much as its worth.

Also, text editors would be a better analogy if the commit message referenced whether it was created in the web ui, tui, or desktop app.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#438

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…

It's not a self-own, it's honest disclosure. It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own. Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#439
post #412

I remember open-source projects announcing their intent to leave GitHub in 2018, as it was being acquired by Microsoft. I was thinking to myself back then: "It's really just a free Git hosting service, and Git was designed to be decentralized at its very core. They don't own anything, only provide the storage and bandwidth. How are they even going to enshittify this?". 8 years later, this is where we are. I'm honestl…

This is nothing. I would bet that soon it will inject ads within the code as comments. Imagine you are reading the code of a class. `LargeFileHandler`. And within the code they inject a comment with an ad for penis enlargement. The possibilities are limitless.

If I recall correctly, what sparked the mass migration to GitHub was the controversy around SourceForge injecting ads into installers of projects hosted there. Now that we have tools that can stealthily inject native-looking ads into programs at the source code level...

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#440
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?" Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for it, and actually choose to PR it in its ultimate form. What utility do the reviews/maintainers get from you marking whats written by you vs. chatgpt? Other than your ability to scapegoat the LLM? The only thing that actually affects me (the hypothetical reviewer) and the project is the qua…

Claude adds "Co-authored by" attribution for itself when committing, so you can see the human author and also the bot. I think this is a good balance, because if you don't care about the bot you still see the human author. And if you do care (for example, I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.

> I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.

Why is this, though? I'm genuinely curious. My code-quality bar doesn't change either way, so why would this be anything but distracting to my decision making?

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