alt Hacker NewsCopilot edited an ad into my PR
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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. We won't do something like this again.
Well, you are not alone: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
I feel like there is an even more important crisis that is being masked over here:
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv...
New Section J — AI features, training, and your data: We’ve added a dedicated section that brings all AI-related terms together in one place. Unless you opt out, you grant GitHub and our affiliates a license to collect and use your inputs (e.g., prompts and code context) and outputs (e.g., suggestions) to develop, train, and improve AI models.
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 <Yet Another SaaS> in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
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.
Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that comment was added by Raycast?
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?
Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed?
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
GitHub have now disabled this: https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...
> We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
How long before the LLM makes sponsored decisions in the actual implementation?
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
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 in this manner?
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.
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
Enshittification will ruin AI the same way it ruined the WWW and YouTube. We're in the golden era right now. Not 2027, 2028. Now now. The ads are coming.
Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.
MS needs to slow down their user hostility otherwise everyone will notice.
I wonder if 1) the PR was created using Raycast and this is the model signing its PR, or 2) if there was some prompt injection done at some point.
Either of these options would still be bad, but here the author suggests that it's just copilot that now just injects ads in its output.
Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for blighted responses.
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.
As companies get more and more desperate to show profitable use of AI expect more and more of these Hail Mary attempts to get traction.
The runway on free cash to fund the current bonanza is running out and crunch time is near.
I've already be patient when claude code always signs my commits as co-author by defualt. Yes, it is.
But I'm also paying the plan. Theres something odd about a tool which i paid for using my output to AD itself.
Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to just products even.
Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.
It reminds me of Anthropic's Super Bowl ad: “Can I get a six pack quickly?” It actually turned out to be true.
This seems to be happening a lot, not sure it is actually intentional
Man, what is the world coming to?
-Sent from my iPhone
Similar to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states entropy tends to increase over time in a closed system, I propose the Nth Law of Privatization: enshitification tends to increase with market capitalization/share over time.
outrageous!
--
Sent from my Android phone
--
Sent from my iPhone
Self-advertisement has been creeping up on us on a lot of places, I am unfortunately pessimistic on how this will turn out
Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast?
Brought to you by Wendy's.
After hiring the brightest minds on the planet for years, the best these companies can think of is more ads.
feels like it's just hardcoded into the prompt. not even trying to be subtle about it.
This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is all open source and only open source.
Decision time, Western man: will you let the “tehe, just a miwtake xsxd UwU” slide or will you do something about? This is just a first pebble.
It’s even worse than the title says. As some other comments point out, this is in millions of repositories across GitHub.
More like, “Copilot edits ads into PRs.”
The title almost makes it sound like it could be a single fluke/one bad prompt but it’s really enshitification at massive scale.
https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
On the bright side, at least it's in the PR text and not the code? (... yet?)
Sheesh.
Is Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing the first large scale prompt injection abuse?
So does Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Albeit more subtle, but they are hardly shy about it
Isn’t this more of a Raycast issue (apparently an agentic ai service) instead of GH Copilot itself?
Do you drive by a billboard that reads
Does advertising work?
Just did!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)
Ray casting, however, is different:
I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal communication between two people, only to find that some third party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
I notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI tools too. It's awful.
I miss the good old days whem there were "hire me" ads in NPM installs.
Its like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive.
time is money, save both. try ramp.
as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.
Next up: watch a 30-second unskippable video ad to see your CI error logs!
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
At this point, Microsoft has lost all trust anyone might have had for them or their products.
Now is the time to move to Linux, and vibe code whatever niceties are keeping you on GitHub.
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=%22%3C%21--+START+COPILOT+CODING...
Here are some of them:
https://github.com/johannesPP/FS-Calculator/pull/2
> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
https://github.com/sharthomas645-tech/HybridAI-Next-React-Vi...
> Send tasks to Copilot coding agent from Slack and Teams to turn conversations into code. Copilot posts an update in your thread when it's finished.
Looks like MS really want to "give tips" about their new integrations.
edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.