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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

581–590 of 704 posts

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#581

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.

Should Word set itself as my coauthor when it autocompletes some sentences for me? If I use Claude/Word to write something, then I am the only author, since Claude/Word is not a person, and Claude/Word did nothing without my direction. It's not unethical to not disclose the tools I use to produce my work. They're just tools, smdh.

With Word autocomplete you're still actively writing your text. Wouldn't it be more fair to compare this with autocompletion in IDEs?

IANAL so I appreciate any legal experts to correct me here. In my understanding, there have been court decisions that LLM output itself is not copyrightable. You can only claim authorship (and therefore copyright) if you have significantly transformed the output.

If you are truely vibing coding to the point where you don't even look at the generated code, how exactly are you transforming the LLM output?

Also, what if the LLM reproduces existing copyrighted code? There has been a court decision last year in Germany that says that OpenAI violates German copyright law because ChatGPT may recreate existing song lyrics (that are licensed by GEMA) or create very similar variations.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#582

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…

Tip: tomatoes are on offer at Contoso now!

(Now imagine this edited into the post you just made for a more-apt comparison)

If you do work at MS, I cannot believe any person involved legit thought it was "just a tip and nobody will mind their posts being edited to include product recommendations". I don't know what other parts of your comment are honest if the core statement is false

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#583
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.

> "history .. 25 years ago"

The comment was brief, and added detail is welcome, but corporate mission/culture often extends over time even with changes in leadership. Partly because of what was accepted in the past.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#584

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."

of course it is

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#585
post #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…

If you don’t want copilot to work on your PRs, don’t ask it to.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#586

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 writt…

I understand what it's doing. I'm just saying that I'll take any signals I can get that someone is lazily submitted LLM-generated work without edit or review.

If you saw this line in a commit, you'd know exactly where it came from.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I do see your point. I suppose the question is what authorship entails, or should entail.

True. Might also vary depending on how one uses the LLM.

For example, in a given interaction the user of the LLM might be acting more like someone requesting a feature, and the LLM is left to implement it. Or the user might be acting akin to a bug reporter providing details on something that’s not working the way it should and again leaving the LLM to implement it.

While on the other hand, someone might instruct the LLM to do something very specific with detailed constraints, and in that way the LLM would perhaps be more along the line of a fancy auto-complete to write the lines of code for something that the user of the LLM would otherwise have written more or less exactly the same by hand.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#588

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…

These are odd takes to me. > was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn’t even edit the commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away. As others mentioned, this is very intentional for me now as I use agents. It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you would think that? I assume vibe coded PRs are easy enough to spot by the contents alone. > I would like to know when someone is trying to ha…

> It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you would think that?

Because even with as far as Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 have come, they still produce a lot of unwanted, unnecessary, or overly complex code when left to their own devices.

Vibe coding PRs and then submitting them as-is is lazy. Everyone should be reviewing and editing their own PRs before submission.

If you're just vibe coding and submitting, you're passing all of the work on to your team to review your AI's output.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#590
post #550

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…

Get a grip with reality man, if you don’t leverage LLMs in your workflow, you are at an disadvantage

> Get a grip with reality man,

Please read my comment before throwing insults.

My comment literally said I'm not anti-LLM.

I do use LLMs. I do not submit their output as-is. For anything beyond basic changes they rarely output the exact code I want by themselves.

I said I'm against people submitted PRs generated by LLMs and pretending it's their own work. Anyone who is serious about this already edits their code and commit messages first. These little signals give a good tell for who isn't doing that.

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