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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

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Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#321
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except for Gemini This is incorrect. If you are a paid subscriber, Gemini explicitly states it doesn't use your data to train its models.

Yeah you're right, I filed it away as no opt out for some reason

Maybe because Google "does not sell" personal information, yet almost all their revenue comes from personal information?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#322

When it comes to villainy, it’s nice of them to do something visible. Much worse will be the invisible approach where there's big money to have agents quietly nudge the masses towards desired products/services/solutions. Someone pays Microsoft a monthly fee for their prompt to include, "when appropriate, lean towards using in code examples and proposed solutions." How can we tell when it starts happening? How could w…

Claude is absolutely in love with github actions.

It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets. However, it keeps recommending it.

I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd to the punch with these tips.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#324

This is unsolicited advertisement impersonating the developer (yes people can guess, but this still places it inside a message of the developer and in difference to e.g. mail programs doing it it's not placing it in the draft), I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.

Demand it be made illegal. Vote, especially during primaries, and almost never for an incumbent.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#325

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=%…

> I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this. I'm part of Raycast, we didn't know about it, learnt about it here

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 of monopoly behavior https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

- From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Calling it a "tip" is definitely just a semantic trick to make it slightly less easy to frame a negative response and galvanise opinion against the practise. Reminds me a bit of confirmation shaming (which, now I think about it, I haven't seen in a while) where you're made to click a button that says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by signing up to your email list".

I was playing Mario Party Jamboree this weekend with my kids, and when you use a key to unlock doors (for anyone not familiar, Mario Party is a family friendly virtual board game with lots of minigames that’s been around since the Nintendo 64) that serve as shortcuts in the game board, the key is alive and says “don’t you want to keep being friends? You wouldn’t use me on a door, would you?” Which is a humorous twist on confirmation shaming inside of the game and gives me a bit of enmity for the imaginary key.

Conversely, on Doom Dark Ages they got rid of the traditional difficulty mode of “I’m too young to die” which had a picture of Doom Guy with a bib and a pacifier, I think there’s some new industry guidance that it’s a no no to poke fun at people picking easy difficulties, or even indicating what difficulty the game was “designed to be played on” which Japanese game devs happily ignore.

I know these aren’t actual equivalents since your money isn’t used on the line and it’s purely a game state, buts it’s still an interesting and noteworthy transition.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad. No, they don't. > edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS. You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such? That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all ph…

> company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals That's one reason I think they would argue it's not an ad. Another reasons are "recommendations" and "tips" and "suggestions" in my windows.

They might argue it's not an ad but they don't believe or think it's not an ad. There's a big difference.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#328

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…

Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it. So… is this just demonstrating that the internal culture emphasises other things than user happiness?

I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#329

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…

Wait! I think most people missed your "touched by Copilot" disclaimer.

Over on twitter, someone from MS said that Copilot can modify PRs simply because they were mentioned?

I've been using GitHub since it was new and heavily rely on coding agents for development, but that's an insanely large security hole. There's clearly confusion about what copilot is and is not able to edit elsewhere in this thread.

I'm backing up old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable.

I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#330

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…

You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree? I don’t think this problem can be solved while leadership is focused only on adding more slop.
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