8 ms·

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

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.

tyleo 6mo ago
I’m curious how the decision to include ads like this was made. Is that something you can share?
- shimman 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ncr100 6mo ago
    MS was deemed a Monopoly I believe around '99 and was not broken up, was instead given behavioral edicts by the court. Microsoft owns GitHub where many of these ethical violations are easily found and were perpetrated. I speculate the cultural safety around that monopoly-power for corporate-benefit behavior could still be present and accepted for negotiations between MS and acquisition targets.
poszlem 6mo ago
Shockingly poor judgment.
QuadmasterXLII 6mo ago
“We won’t do something like this again” A verifiable claim! I put it at 75% you totally will, but if any manifolders think I’m full of it it should converge to something less cynical https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilot-inject-ads-i https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...
- malfist 6mo ago
  I mean its microslop, it'll probably be back by the end of the week. They only know how to let people to say "yes" or "ask again later"
- semiquaver 6mo ago
  Don’t worry, some alternate interpretation of the words “we”, “do”, or “like this” will allow a welch.
- mananaysiempre 6mo ago
  > A verifiable claim! Once you put a deadline on it. As stated I don’t think it is.
itomato 6mo ago
[flagged]
- tyleo 6mo ago
  This feels a bit threatening. Just want to call it out. I also disagree with the decision but I respect that someone came forward and took responsibility. That helps build our shared understanding of what happened. It’s hard and not something we should discourage.
  - itomato 6mo ago
    I feel threatened by Product placements disguised as "Tips". We're not remotely even.
  - g051051 6mo ago
    How is that "threatening"? Genuinely curious.
    - itomato 6mo ago
      And why are they so “threatened”? Are they in the Core AI Org?
jffry 6mo ago
> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement. In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.
- plasma 6mo ago
  To be honest, just a user here, it’s only recently (like a week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR, historically it’s had to open a new one (that merged back to original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to edit existing PRs
- skywhopper 6mo ago
  Nah, PR text is a completely inappropriate place for a tip to appear. A PR description should describe the contents of the PR, not include unrelated, unsolicited advice. It’d be like submitting a bug fix, and saying “this PR fixes bug X, and also, have you considered using a different linter in this project?” Completely inappropriate.
buildbot 6mo ago
[flagged]
- martinwoodward 6mo ago
  We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488
  - coldpie 6mo ago
    > We are not training on the contents of private repos Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of open source code, but respect the license for proprietary code.
  - voganmother42 6mo ago
    Opt out is horse shit
  - jasonjmcghee 6mo ago
    What am I supposed to opt out of? The only setting in "Privacy" is "Suggestions matching public code" which is blocked and seems wholly unrelated to this.
  - ncr100 6mo ago
    This too is creepy. The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors. Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior? Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.
mghackerlady 6mo ago
For some reason I don't believe you. When you do things like this, you lose trust. Work to get it back
markkitti 6mo ago
Thank you for listening.
bilekas 6mo ago
> But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call Hi Tim.. Why is there no pushback from grounded individuals against these decisions ?
- ryandrake 6mo ago
  I'm sure there was push-back, but only inside the minds of the rank-and-file. Nobody would have dared to actually speak out against it, as it would be career limiting. That's probably how a lot of these boneheaded decisions happen: It's an Emperor's New Clothes situation, nobody speaks up, and then the emperor is satisfied that the decision is great.
justinclift 6mo ago
> We won't do something like this again. Microsoft has been pulling user hostile crap for decades, so either "we" or "like this" (or both) is probably not super accurate. ;)
- vdfs 6mo ago
  We will never do something like this unless we get caught
- namrog84 6mo ago
  Having worked in such environments. This particular team will try not to do it again But many other teams didn't make the commitment or learn any lesson. And even the original team will churn over people and people will forget or new leadership comes in. I believe they were being sincere but reality is often more complicated than 1 persons statement.
instakill 6mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 6mo ago
  Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 and please don't post so aggressively. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it has a strong negative effect on HN threads, and we're trying for something different here. You may not feel you owe $BigCoEmployee better (though chances are, said person is just as much a community member here as you and the other users slamming them are), but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - wswope 6mo ago
    GP did not personally attack or denigrate the person they were replying to. As the dozens of other comments show, the overwhelming majority of us do not believe the root commentors claims, and this PM quite objectively does not have the leverage and authority to back their claim that they won’t let this happen again. It’s hard not to read your conception of “trying for something different” as granting undue credulity to a transparently dishonest corporate actor.
    - dang 6mo ago
      I understand, and I don't want to see ads in such contexts either. But "nobody believes this" is of course a personal attack, and "you don't have the power to [do what you just said you will do]" is pretty aggressive too. The impulse to hit back against what is perceived as a "transparently dishonest corporate actor" is natural and human. I feel it also, and in fact my first response when I read such comments is always an adrenaline surge and the peculiar pleasure-hit of righteous indignation. So yes, I know where these feelings are coming from; we all do. The problem is that in the HN context, (1) there is a human being at the other end of the account being attacked, and (2) there are orders of magnitude more attackers. In practice, this can easily turn into a mob dynamic and in fact a mass beating, if a virtual one. That's bad in its own right and bad for the community here. Edit - past explanations in case relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647036 more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20disincent&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
vegadw 6mo ago
Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement: "We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability" This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect. --- Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit. Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
stackghost 6mo ago
Hi Tim, I see that you're a product manager at GitHub. Can you explain why you thought this feature was value-added?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
moconnor 6mo ago
Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it. So… is this just demonstrating that the internal culture emphasises other things than user happiness? I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?
hedora 6mo ago
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 old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable. I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.
- naikrovek 6mo ago
  If you don’t want copilot to work on your PRs, don’t ask it to.
  - manmal 6mo ago
    I would expect it to comment, not alter the code?
    - naikrovek 6mo ago
      It won’t unless you ask it to. It will review your PRs and it will create PRs if you don’t turn those things off, I believe, but it won’t edit or modify any PR. My employer pushes copilot quite hard and I’ve never seen copilot do anything without me telling it to act in some way.
      - manmal 6mo ago
        Thank you for clarifying. It’s hard to get facts nowadays, people are just claiming whatever.
cute_boi 6mo ago
You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree? I don’t think this problem can be solved while leadership is focused only on adding more slop.
hightrix 6mo ago
Just to add to the feedback. No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever. This is how you get your software banned at large companies. Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes men, not actual developers.
- sneak 6mo ago
  They already know that nobody wants it. They don’t care.
  - sudonem 6mo ago
    They’re also developers and probably do care. I’d wager, as always, someone in management with bonus targets to hit probably told them to do it anyway. :/
- creativeSlumber 6mo ago
  > 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 culture question and the entire org would need training. A serious "we won't do it again", needs to be accompanied by a COE on this for identifying what went wrong, and identifying what guardrails can be put in place and then actually implementing them.
  - janc_ 6mo ago
    It seems like this was implemented as a way to insert tips, and then abused to insert ads, so the developers involved might not have been aware of that part until later?
  - QuantumGood 6mo ago
burnte 6mo ago
> 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. It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.
- ChadNauseam 6mo ago
  That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast? But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.
  - AmazingTurtle 6mo ago
    Bet their internal "tips team" used an LLM to generate "useful tips" for their coding agent system ;)
    - johnnyanmac 6mo ago
      Yup, broken windows all the way down, to put it kindly
  - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
    Cambridge Dictionary defines and ad as: a picture, short film, song, etc. that tries to persuade people to buy a product or service My short search really didn't bring up any definition that included the need of the product/service owner knowning that the advertising is happening. And the message very much qualifies as trying to bring people to buy raycast (or at minimum to use it which usually want people to also pay later on).
    - ChadNauseam 6mo ago
      [flagged]
    - 6mo ago
JohnTHaller 6mo ago
For what it's worth, I appreciate that you took the time to address the issue and respond here, Tim.
monegator 6mo ago
> We won't do something like this again. it won't be an ad. It won't be a tip. It will be a suggestion! Recommendation! Opportunity!
- chrisnight 6mo ago
  Be like Discord, call it a “Quest”.
bitdeep 6mo ago
> We won't do something like this again. It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.
Henchman21 6mo ago
WE won't see it happen again ... UNTIL IT DOES! You guys are disingenuous actors. Bad faith and all that. See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV, and when you get that paybump/position you want some other completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same. exact. thing. Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.
odst 6mo ago
"We won't do something like this again" Sureeeeee
- wartywhoa23 6mo ago
  Will surely do something like another thing nobody wanted or needed instead.
AlexandrB 6mo ago
Can I get that in writing in the ToS/EULA please?
nrds 6mo ago
> We won't do something like this again. This has just as much value as when an LLM claims it won't make a certain mistake again, and for exactly the same reason.
m3kw9 6mo ago
Who approved this dumbaz move? It’s clearly an Ad and calling it a tip is insulting
semiinfinitely 6mo ago
[flagged]
naikrovek 6mo ago
We don’t like ads, my man. There are too many MBAs in that company now. MBA holders lose contact with reality about halfway through that degree. Do not listen to them. They will destroy any product they touch if given enough time.
nikisweeting 6mo ago
I know this is not the right place for this but if there's any chance you could send this link to someone internal at Github who knows how to fix this, that would be awesome! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577 It's only semi-related in that it's a similar string thats appearing in millions of repos due to a Github feature change, but it's now polluting Google search results with tons of duplicate URLs unnecessarily. Issue has 100+ votes but has been entirely ignored by Github team.
Aachen 6mo ago
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
explodes 6mo ago
Huge miss. Again. And again. And again.
TonyStr 6mo ago
Thank you, Tim. You should gather together your team and look through the responses to this thread together. There are a lot of emotions in these comments, but it could be a very constructive experience if you're able to put that aside. I'm sure you're aware that customer-sentiment toward Github has been poor lately, but these commenters are your customers. I believe Github has the potential to win back loyalty, but it will require a deeper understanding of your customer segment.
nazgul17 6mo ago
> The goal was to help developers Is Microsoft receiving payments for these?
IAmGraydon 6mo ago
> The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. I appreciate the rest of your reply, but it would be generous to say you're stretching the truth here. Yes, the official MS statement is that these are "tips", but you, I, and everyone else here knows what this is.
miraculixx 6mo ago
So you continue to show ads to Copilt, just not to the user? If so, not a fix.
yakshaving_jgt 6mo ago
This was obviously a terrible error of judgement. Will you be resigning over this?
NicoJuicy 6mo ago
I literally thought it was an early April fool's
keremimo 6mo ago
You mean ads. Don't sugarcoat it. They are ads. Not tips. Ads.
trueno 6mo ago
mate nobody wants unwarranted tips. have you guys lost your mind
tgsovlerkhgsel 6mo ago
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 "<my random product> 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?

tyleo 6mo ago

I’m curious how the decision to include ads like this was made. Is that something you can share?

shimman 6mo ago
[flagged]
- ncr100 6mo ago
  MS was deemed a Monopoly I believe around '99 and was not broken up, was instead given behavioral edicts by the court. Microsoft owns GitHub where many of these ethical violations are easily found and were perpetrated. I speculate the cultural safety around that monopoly-power for corporate-benefit behavior could still be present and accepted for negotiations between MS and acquisition targets.

poszlem 6mo ago

Shockingly poor judgment.

QuadmasterXLII 6mo ago

“We won’t do something like this again” A verifiable claim! I put it at 75% you totally will, but if any manifolders think I’m full of it it should converge to something less cynical https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilot-inject-ads-i https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...

malfist 6mo ago
I mean its microslop, it'll probably be back by the end of the week. They only know how to let people to say "yes" or "ask again later"
semiquaver 6mo ago
Don’t worry, some alternate interpretation of the words “we”, “do”, or “like this” will allow a welch.
mananaysiempre 6mo ago
> A verifiable claim! Once you put a deadline on it. As stated I don’t think it is.

itomato 6mo ago

[flagged]

tyleo 6mo ago
This feels a bit threatening. Just want to call it out. I also disagree with the decision but I respect that someone came forward and took responsibility. That helps build our shared understanding of what happened. It’s hard and not something we should discourage.
- itomato 6mo ago
  I feel threatened by Product placements disguised as "Tips". We're not remotely even.
- g051051 6mo ago
  How is that "threatening"? Genuinely curious.
  - itomato 6mo ago
    And why are they so “threatened”? Are they in the Core AI Org?

jffry 6mo ago

> We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips" like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement. In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification of the PR description to insert unrelated content is specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the description of a PR instead.

plasma 6mo ago
To be honest, just a user here, it’s only recently (like a week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR, historically it’s had to open a new one (that merged back to original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to edit existing PRs
skywhopper 6mo ago
Nah, PR text is a completely inappropriate place for a tip to appear. A PR description should describe the contents of the PR, not include unrelated, unsolicited advice. It’d be like submitting a bug fix, and saying “this PR fixes bug X, and also, have you considered using a different linter in this project?” Completely inappropriate.

buildbot 6mo ago

[flagged]

martinwoodward 6mo ago
We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi... That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488
- coldpie 6mo ago
  > We are not training on the contents of private repos Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of open source code, but respect the license for proprietary code.
- voganmother42 6mo ago
  Opt out is horse shit
- jasonjmcghee 6mo ago
  What am I supposed to opt out of? The only setting in "Privacy" is "Suggestions matching public code" which is blocked and seems wholly unrelated to this.
- ncr100 6mo ago
  This too is creepy. The behavioral impositions by the court in the United States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors. Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos where they have not opted out of this training via its GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States during its trial for Monopoly behavior? Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.

mghackerlady 6mo ago

For some reason I don't believe you. When you do things like this, you lose trust. Work to get it back

markkitti 6mo ago

Thank you for listening.

bilekas 6mo ago

> But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call Hi Tim.. Why is there no pushback from grounded individuals against these decisions ?

ryandrake 6mo ago
I'm sure there was push-back, but only inside the minds of the rank-and-file. Nobody would have dared to actually speak out against it, as it would be career limiting. That's probably how a lot of these boneheaded decisions happen: It's an Emperor's New Clothes situation, nobody speaks up, and then the emperor is satisfied that the decision is great.

justinclift 6mo ago

> We won't do something like this again. Microsoft has been pulling user hostile crap for decades, so either "we" or "like this" (or both) is probably not super accurate. ;)

vdfs 6mo ago
We will never do something like this unless we get caught
namrog84 6mo ago
Having worked in such environments. This particular team will try not to do it again But many other teams didn't make the commitment or learn any lesson. And even the original team will churn over people and people will forget or new leadership comes in. I believe they were being sincere but reality is often more complicated than 1 persons statement.

instakill 6mo ago

[flagged]

dang 6mo ago
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 and please don't post so aggressively. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it has a strong negative effect on HN threads, and we're trying for something different here. You may not feel you owe $BigCoEmployee better (though chances are, said person is just as much a community member here as you and the other users slamming them are), but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wswope 6mo ago
  GP did not personally attack or denigrate the person they were replying to. As the dozens of other comments show, the overwhelming majority of us do not believe the root commentors claims, and this PM quite objectively does not have the leverage and authority to back their claim that they won’t let this happen again. It’s hard not to read your conception of “trying for something different” as granting undue credulity to a transparently dishonest corporate actor.
  - dang 6mo ago
    I understand, and I don't want to see ads in such contexts either. But "nobody believes this" is of course a personal attack, and "you don't have the power to [do what you just said you will do]" is pretty aggressive too. The impulse to hit back against what is perceived as a "transparently dishonest corporate actor" is natural and human. I feel it also, and in fact my first response when I read such comments is always an adrenaline surge and the peculiar pleasure-hit of righteous indignation. So yes, I know where these feelings are coming from; we all do. The problem is that in the HN context, (1) there is a human being at the other end of the account being attacked, and (2) there are orders of magnitude more attackers. In practice, this can easily turn into a mob dynamic and in fact a mass beating, if a virtual one. That's bad in its own right and bad for the community here. Edit - past explanations in case relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647036 more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20disincent&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

vegadw 6mo ago

Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement: "We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability" This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect. --- Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit. Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

stackghost 6mo ago

Hi Tim, I see that you're a product manager at GitHub. Can you explain why you thought this feature was value-added?

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

moconnor 6mo ago

Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it. So… is this just demonstrating that the internal culture emphasises other things than user happiness? I also note that ”for PRs” - will we see these appearing as comments in generated code?

hedora 6mo ago

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 old repos now, and am no longer trusting your service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will enable. I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped below three nines back in 2024-2025.

naikrovek 6mo ago
If you don’t want copilot to work on your PRs, don’t ask it to.
- manmal 6mo ago
  I would expect it to comment, not alter the code?
  - naikrovek 6mo ago
    It won’t unless you ask it to. It will review your PRs and it will create PRs if you don’t turn those things off, I believe, but it won’t edit or modify any PR. My employer pushes copilot quite hard and I’ve never seen copilot do anything without me telling it to act in some way.
    - manmal 6mo ago
      Thank you for clarifying. It’s hard to get facts nowadays, people are just claiming whatever.

cute_boi 6mo ago

You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree? I don’t think this problem can be solved while leadership is focused only on adding more slop.

hightrix 6mo ago

Just to add to the feedback. No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not inject anything that is outside of the context of the session, ever. This is how you get your software banned at large companies. Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back? Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team full of yes men, not actual developers.

sneak 6mo ago
They already know that nobody wants it. They don’t care.
- sudonem 6mo ago
  They’re also developers and probably do care. I’d wager, as always, someone in management with bonus targets to hit probably told them to do it anyway. :/
creativeSlumber 6mo ago
> 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 culture question and the entire org would need training. A serious "we won't do it again", needs to be accompanied by a COE on this for identifying what went wrong, and identifying what guardrails can be put in place and then actually implementing them.
- janc_ 6mo ago
  It seems like this was implemented as a way to insert tips, and then abused to insert ads, so the developers involved might not have been aware of that part until later?
- QuantumGood 6mo ago

burnte 6mo ago

> 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. It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you name other products, that's an ad.

ChadNauseam 6mo ago
That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast? But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.
- AmazingTurtle 6mo ago
  Bet their internal "tips team" used an LLM to generate "useful tips" for their coding agent system ;)
  - johnnyanmac 6mo ago
    Yup, broken windows all the way down, to put it kindly
- NekkoDroid 6mo ago
  Cambridge Dictionary defines and ad as: a picture, short film, song, etc. that tries to persuade people to buy a product or service My short search really didn't bring up any definition that included the need of the product/service owner knowning that the advertising is happening. And the message very much qualifies as trying to bring people to buy raycast (or at minimum to use it which usually want people to also pay later on).
  - ChadNauseam 6mo ago
    [flagged]
  - 6mo ago

JohnTHaller 6mo ago

For what it's worth, I appreciate that you took the time to address the issue and respond here, Tim.

monegator 6mo ago

> We won't do something like this again. it won't be an ad. It won't be a tip. It will be a suggestion! Recommendation! Opportunity!

chrisnight 6mo ago
Be like Discord, call it a “Quest”.

bitdeep 6mo ago

> We won't do something like this again. It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.

Henchman21 6mo ago

WE won't see it happen again ... UNTIL IT DOES! You guys are disingenuous actors. Bad faith and all that. See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV, and when you get that paybump/position you want some other completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same. exact. thing. Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.

odst 6mo ago

"We won't do something like this again" Sureeeeee

wartywhoa23 6mo ago
Will surely do something like another thing nobody wanted or needed instead.

AlexandrB 6mo ago

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

nrds 6mo ago

> We won't do something like this again. This has just as much value as when an LLM claims it won't make a certain mistake again, and for exactly the same reason.

m3kw9 6mo ago

Who approved this dumbaz move? It’s clearly an Ad and calling it a tip is insulting

semiinfinitely 6mo ago

[flagged]

naikrovek 6mo ago

We don’t like ads, my man. There are too many MBAs in that company now. MBA holders lose contact with reality about halfway through that degree. Do not listen to them. They will destroy any product they touch if given enough time.

nikisweeting 6mo ago

I know this is not the right place for this but if there's any chance you could send this link to someone internal at Github who knows how to fix this, that would be awesome! https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577 It's only semi-related in that it's a similar string thats appearing in millions of repos due to a Github feature change, but it's now polluting Google search results with tons of duplicate URLs unnecessarily. Issue has 100+ votes but has been entirely ignored by Github team.

Aachen 6mo ago

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

explodes 6mo ago

Huge miss. Again. And again. And again.

TonyStr 6mo ago

Thank you, Tim. You should gather together your team and look through the responses to this thread together. There are a lot of emotions in these comments, but it could be a very constructive experience if you're able to put that aside. I'm sure you're aware that customer-sentiment toward Github has been poor lately, but these commenters are your customers. I believe Github has the potential to win back loyalty, but it will require a deeper understanding of your customer segment.

nazgul17 6mo ago

> The goal was to help developers Is Microsoft receiving payments for these?

IAmGraydon 6mo ago

> The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. I appreciate the rest of your reply, but it would be generous to say you're stretching the truth here. Yes, the official MS statement is that these are "tips", but you, I, and everyone else here knows what this is.

miraculixx 6mo ago

So you continue to show ads to Copilt, just not to the user? If so, not a fix.

yakshaving_jgt 6mo ago

This was obviously a terrible error of judgement. Will you be resigning over this?

NicoJuicy 6mo ago

I literally thought it was an early April fool's

keremimo 6mo ago

You mean ads. Don't sugarcoat it. They are ads. Not tips. Ads.

trueno 6mo ago

mate nobody wants unwarranted tips. have you guys lost your mind

tgsovlerkhgsel 6mo ago

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 "<my random product> 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?