Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 704 posts

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#551

Post by phoe-krk »

stronglikedan wrote: post #541
phoe-krk wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm trying to sign up but it won't resolve the DNS.

Our service has been created on April 1st, it's possible that your DNS resolver is still living in the past. That's a temporary technical difficulty.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#552

Post by themafia »

kstenerud wrote: post #365

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…

Stealing copyrighted code and calling it your own is not a "skill."

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#553

Post by m3kw9 »

plastic041 wrote: post #118

This "ad" is not exactly new. Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad. I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this. 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=%…

You just text replaced Ad with Tip, it’s still an ad

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#554

Post by BeetleB »

mannanj wrote: post #548
palmotea wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your own. I disagree on that. It's really a gray area. If it's some lazy vibecoded shit, I think what you say totally applies. If the human did the thinking, gave the agent detailed instructions, and/or carefully reviewed the output, then I don't think it's so clear cut. And full disclosure, I'm reacting more to copilot here, which lists…

Telling someone you did something that you actually didn't do isn't a gray area, it's a lie. Using AI tools to code and then hiding that is unethical imo.

> Telling someone you did something that you actually didn't do isn't a gray area, it's a lie.

Pre-LLMs, various helper tools (including LSPs), would make code changes to improve the quality of the code - from simple things like adding a const specifier to a function, to changing the actual function being called.

No one insisted that the commit shouldn't have the human's name on it.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#555

Post by m3kw9 »

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…

Who approved this dumbaz move? It’s clearly an Ad and calling it a tip is insulting

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#556

Post by drfloyd51 »

yarn_ wrote: post #393
kstenerud wrote: post #365

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…

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…

Knowing if an AI contributed is good data. The human is still responsible for the content of the PR.

While code is good or not, evaluating it is a bit of a subjective exercise. We like to think we are infallible code evaluating machines. But the truth is, we make mistakes. And we also shortcut. So knowing who made the commit, and if they used AI can help us evaluate the code more effectively.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#557

Post by esafak »

waisbrot wrote: post #431
lokimedes wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you want more metadata going forward: https://usegitai.com/

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#558

Post by rchaud »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #385
ncr100 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creepy. Looks like they rolled it back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233 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 o…

> 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.

The Microsoft that was prosecuted for monopoly behaviour 25 years ago is definitely not the same Microsoft that owns:

- Github

- LinkedIn

- Activision Blizzard

- Xbox

- Azure, Sharepoint and Teams w/Copilot embedded everywhere

- major stake in OpenAI

- a multibillion dollar ad product portfolio (LinkedIn ads, Bing Ads)

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#559

Post by calibas »

Aurornis wrote: post #348

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…

You're conflating two different things. When an LLM writes a commit, it should take credit. I see nothing wrong with it adding:

> Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com

Compare that to the message the article is talking about:

> Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast (https://gh.io/cca-raycast-docs).

It's not just mentioning it was written via Copilot, it's explicitly advertising for another product.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#560

Post by esafak »

neya wrote: post #384
Aurornis wrote: post #348

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 would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them. Absolutely spot on. Maybe I'm old school, but I never let AI touch my commit message history. That is for me - when 6 months down the line I am looking at it, retracing my steps - affirming my thought process and direction of development, I need absolute clarity. That is also because I take pride in my work. If you let an AI…

If you architect and review everything, but someone else does the implementation, and you iterate, do you believe you did not do anything? I let AI write the commit message too, and the motivation behind the PR is the first thing in it. With my guidance, of course.
Post reply on HN