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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

481–490 of 704 posts

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#481
post #361

I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads in their PRs. >Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe. Sometimes AI can be right.

It’s not really ads, it’s more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.

"Sent from my iPhone" is just as bad. If you don't see it then IDK what to tell you.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#482

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…

Agreed! Easy close/ban for me.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#483
post #453
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Accountability. Same reason I want to read human written content rather than obvious AI: both can be equally shit, but at least with humans there's a high probability of the aspirational quality of wanting to be considered "good" With AI I have no way of telling if it was from a one line prompt or hundreds. I have to assume it was one line by default if there's no human sticking their neck out for it.

The human who submitted the PR is 100% accountable either way, thats partly my point.

Disclosing AI has its purposes, I agree, but its not like we can reliably get everyone to do it anyway, which also leads me to thinking this way.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#484
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Personally it would make the choice to say no to the entire thing a whole lot easier if they self-reported on themselves automatically and with no recourse to hide the fact that they've used LLMs. I want to see it for dependencies (I already avoid them, and would especially do so with ones heavily developed via LLMs), products I'd like to use, PRs submitted to my projects, and so on, so I can choose to avoid them. Mo…

This is shouting at the clouds I'm afraid (I don't mean this in a dismissive way). I understand the reasoning, but it's frankly none of your business how I write my code or my commits, unless I choose to share that with you. You also have a right to deny my PRs in your own project of course, and you don't even have to tell me why! I think on github at least you can even ban me from submitting PRs.

While I agree that it would be nice to filter out low effort PRs, I just don't see how you could possibly police it without infringing on freedoms. If you made it mandatory for frontier models, people would find a way around it, or simply write commits themselves, or use open weight models from China, etc.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#485
post #393

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…

It’s not about who wrote it, but about who is submitting it. The LLM co-author indicates that the agent submitted it, which is a contraindication of there being a human taking responsibility for it.

That being said, it also matters who wrote it, because it’s more likely for LLMs to write code that looks like quality code but is wrong, than the same is for humans.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#486

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.

I think it depends a lot if you reviewed it as carefully as you would your own code. Of course most people don’t do that

In my project's readme I put this text:

   "There is no commit by an agent user, for two reasons:

    * If an agent commits locally during development, the code is reviewed and often thoroughly modified and rearranged by a human.
    * I don't want to push unreviewed code to the repo, so I have set up a git hook refusing to push commits done by an LLM agent."

It's not that I want to hide the use of llms, I just modified code a lot before pushing, which led me to this approach. As llms improve, I might have to change this though.

Interested to read opinions on this approach.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#487
post #63

I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes. I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit…

this can be disabled with a setting: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#488

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…

Can I get that in writing in the ToS/EULA please?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#489
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Personally it would make the choice to say no to the entire thing a whole lot easier if they self-reported on themselves automatically and with no recourse to hide the fact that they've used LLMs. I want to see it for dependencies (I already avoid them, and would especially do so with ones heavily developed via LLMs), products I'd like to use, PRs submitted to my projects, and so on, so I can choose to avoid them. Mo…

I mean sure, in the same sense that law enforcement would be a lot easier if all the criminals just came to the police station and gave themselves up

Again though, people can trivially hide the fact they used an LLM to whatever extent, so we kind of need to adjust accordingly.

Even if saying no to all LLM involvement seemed pertinent, it doesn't seem possible in the first place.

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