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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

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Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#561

Post by yodsanklai »

palmotea wrote: post #527
mikkupikku wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

> It's really a gray area.

Yes, it really depends on how much work the agent did produce. It could be as little as doing a renaming or a refactoring, or execute direct orders that require no creativity or problem solving. In which case the agent shouldn't be credited more than the linter or the IDE.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#562

Post by mananaysiempre »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #257
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 won’t do something like this again” A verifiable claim! I put it at 75% you totally will, but if any manifolders think I’m full of it it should converge to something less cynical https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...

> A verifiable claim!

Once you put a deadline on it. As stated I don’t think it is.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#563

Post by microtonal »

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…

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 problem is that submitters often do not feel responsible for it anymore. They will just feed review comments back to the LLM and let the LLM answer and make fixes.

This is disrespectful of the maintainers' time. If the submitter is just vibe/slop coding without any effort on their part, it's less work to do it myself directly using an LLM than having to instruct someone else's LLM through GitHub PR comments.

In this case it's better to just submit an issue and let me just implement it myself (with or without an LLM).

If the PR has a _co-authored by _ signal, then I don't have to spend time giving detailed feedback under the assumption that I am helping another human.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#564

Post by creativeSlumber »

hightrix wrote: post #351
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…

Just to add to the feedback. No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever. This is how you get your software banned at large companies. Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes m…

> did anyone on the team really not push back?

This is the real question. If they are serious about not doing something like this again, they NEED to look at what process failed and let something like this get proposed, designed, implemented and pushed to production. Usually things get reviewed at each stage. Did the people who pushed back on this get steam rolled? If no one pushed back, that's an even serious culture question and the entire org would need training.

A serious "we won't do it again", needs to be accompanied by a COE on this for identifying what went wrong, and identifying what guardrails can be put in place and then actually implementing them.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#565

Post by hombre_fatal »

alsetmusic wrote: post #532
hombre_fatal wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implementor only got credit in the day where the implementor was a human who had to do a lot of the work, often all of the work. Now that the cost of writing code is $0, the planner gets the credit. Like how you don't put human code reviewers down as coauthors, you also don't put the computer down as a coauthor for everything you use the computer to do. It used to be the case where if someone wrote the software,…

> And asking people to opt-in to some shame tag isn't a solution that generalizes nor fixes anything. Instead we should demand good software just like we did when it was all human-written and still crappy. It’s not about shame. It’s about disclosure of effort / perceived-quality. And you’re right about the second part, but there’s even less chance of that being enforced / adopted.

The problem is that you cannot get people to self-tag "this is crap / low effort". Especially not the worst actors that consistently generate garbage.

If they could do that, then they wouldn't be wasting your time to begin with. They'd have the ability to go "nah this PR is trash".

So the next idea is that we can find some sort of proxy, like whether someone used an LLM or not. But that's too ham-fisted since expert engineers with all the self-awareness also use the tool, and they have the ability and self-awareness to know that the software they are shipping is good quality, so why would they use the shame tag?

The shame tag has no audience. It's a fantasy that low quality actors will self-identify, else all sorts of societal problems would be made trivial.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#566

Post by user34283 »

josephg wrote: post #468
corndoge wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, nothing wrong with keeping the metadata - but "Authored-by" is both credit and an attestation of responsibility. I think people just haven't thought about it too much and see it mostly as credit and less as responsibility.

I disagree. “Authored by” - and authorship in general - says who did the work. Not who signed off on the work. Reviewed-by me, authored by Claude feels most correct.

I am doing the work. Claude is a tool, and I won't attribute authorship to it.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#567

Post by yarn_ »

microtonal wrote: post #563
yarn_ wrote: 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…

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 problem is that submitters often do not feel responsible for it anymore. They will just feed review comments back to the LLM and let the LLM answer and make fixes. This is disrespectful of the maintainers' time. If the submitter is just vibe/slop coding withou…

Right but these are bad actors, roughly speaking, so why should I expect them to disclose the fact that they're using LLMs to me?

If someone is repeatedly sending me slop to look at I'll block them whether or not they tell me an LLM was involved

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#568

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

corndoge wrote: post #542
josephg wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. “Authored by” - and authorship in general - says who did the work. Not who signed off on the work. Reviewed-by me, authored by Claude feels most correct.

To me, Claude is not a who, it's an it. Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine for the portions of code it completed? Same thing

> Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine for the portions of code it completed?

Code completions before LLMs was helping me type faster by completing variable names, variable types, function arguments, and that’s about it. It was faster than typing it all out character by character, but the auto completion wasn’t doing anything outside of what I was already intending to write.

With an LLM, I give brief explanations in English to it and it returns tens to hundreds of lines of code at a time. For some people perhaps even more than that. Or you could be having a “conversation” with the LLM about the feature to be added first and then when you’ve explored what it will be like conceptually, you tell it to implement that.

In either case, I would then commit all of that resulting code with the name of the LLM I used as author, and my name as the committer. The tool wrote the code. I committed it.

As the committer of the code, I am responsible for what I commit to the code base, and everyone is able to see who the committer was. I don’t need to claim authorship over the code that the tool wrote in order for people to be able to see who committed it. And it is in my opinion incorrect to claim authorship over any commit that consists for the very most part of AI generated code.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#569

Post by AmazingTurtle »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #544
burnte wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.

That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast? But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.

Bet their internal "tips team" used an LLM to generate "useful tips" for their coding agent system ;)

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#570

Post by microtonal »

martinwoodward wrote: post #275
buildbot wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488

IANAL I wonder how that is legal in the EU, at least for private individuals, since under the GDPR you need consent for collecting such data. (A timed opt-out is not consent.)
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