alt Hacker News"Over 1.5 million GitHub PRs have had ads injected into them by Copilot"
Comments
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 trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
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 Claude co-author note.
AI coding is a new skill that we're all still figuring out, so this will help us develop best practices for generating quality code.
In case people missed it in the other thread, 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.
It's like the modern version of "Get your free email with Hotmail" or "This website hosted by Geocities".
related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
response from timrogers (product manager at github):
"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."
Anyone have an example?
This is why one reason why local coding models are quite relevant, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. No ads, and you are in control.
As the "agent web" progresses, how will advertisers actually get access to human eyeballs?
Will our agents just be proxies for garbage like injected marketing prompts?
I feel like this is going to be an existential moment for advertising that ultimately will lead to intrusive opportunities like this.
Microslop strikes again! AI implementations have really distilled all the shitty business practices tech companies have been doing into highly visible missteps.
It is interesting watching all these large companies essentially try to "start-up" these new products and absolutely fail.
Example of multiple items discussing the same topic, both on https://news.ycombinator.com/active
I really wish this was an April fools story. It's good to see that at least it has been disabled again, although I can't imagine that it will be long before this comes back again. Also, (I can't find it now, but) I thought there was an article here on HN recently that clarified that inference cost can probably be covered by the subscription prices, just not training costs?
Hooray! This is the future we've all hoped for!
Cursor does similar at least. I hate it and therefore write my own commit messages.
the SourceForge parallel is what gets me. they did the exact same thing with installers and it killed them. people moved to GitHub specifically to get away from that.
1.5M PRs is wild though. that's a lot of repos where the "product tips" just sat there unchallenged because nobody reads bot-generated PR descriptions carefully enough. which is kinda the real problem here, not the ads themselves.
Damn Microsoft out here really finding new ways to serve ads.
This only gets better when there's a financial penalty for doing it. Ads do almost nothing but it costs them even less.
Title is wrong, should be "New form of cancer discovered".
It took me some time to understand how big the advertisement market is, things flowing in the direction seem natural when it comes to making money out of the investment.
The irony when NeoWin covers it's whole page with "promoted content" when you try and back out of the page.
Time to get GitLab.
I remember open-source projects announcing their intent to leave GitHub in 2018, as it was being acquired by Microsoft. I was thinking to myself back then: "It's really just a free Git hosting service, and Git was designed to be decentralized at its very core. They don't own anything, only provide the storage and bandwidth. How are they even going to enshittify this?".
8 years later, this is where we are. I'm honestly just stunned, it takes some real talent to run a company that does it as consistently well as Microsoft.
Well, CoPilot is a GitHub technology, and they're telling you that AI wrote the PR. It's not _that_ bad. I suppose they could distill it to "Written with CoPilot" with a link for more information.
The future is here! Glorious ads that will make you so efficient! Save time coding by consuming ads, you were never going to attain expert level professional skills anyways.
At some point he who pays the piper was going to call the tune...
It's the hotmail signature all over again?
Not surprised at all, just another enshitified product by Microsoft. Carry on.
microslop at it again
It's the same with Claude Code actually, and recently Codex too...
Claude never used to do this but at some point it started adding itself by default as a co-author on every commit.
Literally, in the last week, Codex started making all it's branches as "codex-feature-name", and will continue to do so, even if you tell it to never do that again.
Really, really annoying.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
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Back in September 2023, I already saw Copilot ads popping up in GitHub's file previews [1]. After three years, it's wild to see how advertising has reached areas I honestly never thought it would.
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.