Copilot edited an ad into my PR • Hacker News Board

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#151

Post by plastic041 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 7:59 AM UTC

esperent wrote: post #125

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=%…

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.

I do think it's just an ad. Also it's a bad kind of one because 1) it disguises itself as a tip 2) makes people to think if it's an ad for Raycast or other services, when actually it's just promoting itself.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#152

Post by dvfjsdhgfv » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:04 AM UTC

Brosper wrote: post #110

jruohonen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?

It's baked in literally into every coding tutorial and is kind of industry standard, like JIRA. Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.

Most larger orgs I worked for used Gitlab rather than Github.

Anyway, the core value of Github has always been collaboration - this is where people were. If people go to other platforms, this core value dwindles. And switching platforms is not that difficult.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#153

Post by steve1977 » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:05 AM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #142

steve1977 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but Codeberg is only for free and open source projects.

You are free to host your own instance for commercial software.

But that would be Forgejo and some other projects AFAIK, not Codeberg (which is basically a hosting service using these projects)

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#154

Post by maxloh » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:06 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #82

jruohonen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?

I believe Codeberg is the new hotness

Codeberg is for FOSS repos only, and you need to submit an application before using their CI: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#155

Post by kdheiwns » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

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.

Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#156

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC

paweladamczuk wrote: post #130

I was recently running Copilot CLI in a sandbox on autopilot mode and it kept overriding git config to put only "GitHub Copilot" as commit author instead of my name. Strongly worded instructions weren't helping, I had to resort to the permission system to change this behavior. I wonder if this is consistent with their terms of service. I mean, maybe they DO take all the responsibility for the code I generate and push…

No it's just that those commits aren't copyrightable and they probably want to reuse them in the future.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#157

Post by VBprogrammer » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC

A little bit off topic but our company recently enforced Microsoft Authenticator for account login. Which I was mildly annoyed about but now I'm super pissed off because they have started abusing the notification permission granted to allow authenticator to work to push out ads for Microsoft 365. It feels like we've gone back to 90s Microsoft when everyone hated them.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#158

Post by probably_wrong » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:11 AM UTC

baliex wrote: post #128

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #116

Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.

To play devil’s advocate^, wouldn’t it be plagiarism if it didn’t? ^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this context.

No. Plagiarism applies to people, not tools.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#159

Post by lionkor » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:15 AM UTC

flogy wrote: post #42

WD-42 wrote: post #8

Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?

Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.

Yes https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#160

Post by jjav » Mon, Mar 30, 2026, 8:16 AM UTC

theturtletalks wrote: post #143

KGunnerud wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another step into ensh*ttification? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time. At least with open-source, you can fork it and remove the "features" or point your agent to it and have it write the feature in your tech stack. Hell, I just saw an amazing open-source alternative to Raycast[0] and just repl…

> It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's just a matter of time.

Stallman was always right, after all.