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Copilot edited an ad into my PR

notes.zachmanson.com

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Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#691

Post by whattheheckheck »

cookiengineer wrote: post #666
heavyset_go wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot. Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents. This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.

Can somebody explain to me why this is legal? If anybody but Microsoft does this, it's called malware and they'll end up with an FBI visit and prison time. Why are the judicative so skewed here in their judgements?

They have trillions

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#692

Post by whattheheckheck »

nulltrace wrote: post #647
heavyset_go wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot. Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your computer while running their Copilot agents. This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually removed them.

Spent yesterday pruning dependencies in a project. Cut half of them and everything still worked. Makes you wonder how much stuff we pull in without thinking about it. Same thing with AI-generated PRs honestly, one bad suggestion and it ships.

No linter?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#693

Post by trevor-e »

Aurornis wrote: post #588
trevor-e wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Right, and I agree with all of that, but that's not related to my point.

You are saying "if you leave the AI attribution in the PR/commit description, it HAS to be a slop PR that was not reviewed by a human beforehand". And I'm saying that's not true at all and you shouldn't assume that.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#694

Post by salamander014 »

QuantumGood wrote: post #594
creativeSlumber wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cultur…

> did anyone on the team really not push back? That's a tough one. In the big meeting? In the small meeting? "Officially" push back? Encouraged to make the push back unofficial? Etc. Even just internally, it can be hard to quantify. From internal > external, more so.

This so much.

The number of times I’ve had to defend someone else’s customers let alone my own is exhausting.

And that dynamic is only allowed within close circles.

I’ve found once “the decision” is made, the bigger the subsequent meeting, protests are often swept under the rug.

On most occasions the worst part is that folks intentionally withhold information to get their way. And thats real hard to compete against without making an ass out of yourself, or losing the trust of others.

This is why core principals matter so much.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#695

Post by plastic041 »

antonvs wrote: post #678
plastic041 wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, at least their PM thinks(or argue ) it's a tip[0]. Also it's pretty obvious I was just being sarcastic about MS's behaviors. I don't know why you are so mean but please don't be. Have a nice day. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233

The correct word would be that the PM claims it’s a tip. Now ask yourself whether a PM who realizes he or his team has made a terrible mistake and is doing damage control in public is likely to make only true claims. Correcting your mistakes is not mean. If you didn’t mean what you wrote, well hey, that’s a good example of the difference between what you think and what you say. See how that works?

Correcting my mistakes isn't mean but...

> In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.

Or

> See how that works?

These are. You can be sarcastic as much as you want to be but I can't?

And again, I really don't understand why are you so mean about this. I read some of your other comments and many of them are unnecessarily mean. Please be nice.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#697

Post by nurettin »

politelemon wrote: post #102
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #16

I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable

> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.

It is useful. It tells me that the sender isn't tech savvy and/or likes to show that they prefer expensive apple products. It is like carrying a Prada or Ray-Ban.

It also tells me that they probably don't care about second hand embarrassment.

And it tells me that they checked my email while away from keyboard, which means they are hard working individuals who care about business, but not enough to rush to a computer to reply properly.

Lots of social ques on that one.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#698

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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…

Including ads in Copilot-generated content (that is clearly marked as such or approved by a human before being posted in their name) would be a bad judgement call. Adding ads to other people's human-written content, without their knowledge or informed consent, is a criminally bad judgement call if it was intentional. And I don't use the term metaphorically: You're impersonating other people to post your advertising in their name. You are pretending that Zach Manson finds your product so awesome that he includes a recommendation for it in PRs that he personally posts.

Imagine what Microsoft's lawyers would do to me if I made a billboard " is awesome, use it -- Satya Nadella" and started sticking it all over the city.

I don't see any effort to remediate it. Have you informed people whose names you used to post the ads and offered them to remove the ads?

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#699

Post by theshrike79 »

tyleo wrote: post #251
mathieudutour wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I haven’t clicked through so all I know about Raycast is, “that’s the company that gets shoved into ads by copilot.” Sounds like it’s not your fault but it’s probably doing some brand damage :/

Raycast is like Alfred, but with MORE AI. Which made me go 'ugh' even before this.

Automatic AI ads on it didn't help. But the team member saying they had no involvement in this brought my opinion of Raycast from 'ewwwwww' back to 'ugh'.

Re: Copilot edited an ad into my PR

#700

Post by ncr100 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #385
ncr100 wrote: 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.

True!

I think it is more reasonable to expect that the corporate behavior @ MS would remain in spite of the turn-over, especially if it's valuable / profitable to MS.

See "Tim Cook" at Apple and the preparation (the "we will do things Steve's way" pledge) run-up to him taking over after Steve Jobs's exit from CEO-ship was announced. Apple is still doing many business activities in the same way.

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