> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
Microslop for a while now seems to be testing exactly how much you can abuse the user before they move somewhere else. Windows is a prime example. Everything is ads, tracking, popups, annoyances, etc.
They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.
You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.
OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).
It’s like how Disney Plus “ad free” tier shows you ads for Hulu and Disney Perks. They probably redefine “ad” in their terms of service so their own ads are called something else.
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.
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.
We should not be using Copilot in the first place.
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
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?
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 in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I have a somewhat similar problem with github issue templates. They automatically stuff I don't care about or would propose and structure things in ways I don't like. Granted, I can edited this away, but it requires extra time and makes filing issues more work than before. Biggest case in point is the "I will adhere to the Code of Conduct". In general I do not care about CoCs and it is fascinating how CoCs leak into everywhere for some so-called "open source" projects. They don't seem to understand the issue when the licence does not require a CoC; even then the issue is not about the CoC in and by itself (though I also find them pointless), but that extra content is automatically added to issue templates in general, CoCs just being one of many spam-options. And I also recall some donation-ads that are automatically added too - I have no problem when projects request financial support, but if I file an issue then the issue is about the content of the issue, not about anything else.
You have to think about the security implications of this.
How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.
A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.
One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Unless you're big enough like Meta, Microsoft, etc.
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.
this is the thing that keeps me up at night about AI tools across the board. the moment your tool starts optimizing for someone elses goals instead of yours the entire value propostion collapses. doesnt matter how good the output is if you cant trust the intent behind it. we already see this with AI image generators where certain styles get pushed becuase of partnerships or training data bias, you just dont notice it as easily as an ad in a PR
I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
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.
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?
1.5M records of PRs affected. Does Microsoft copilot ask users for the permission of adding ads inside their PRs before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
Now EVERYONE can see ads disguised as PRs on GitHub. Does Microsoft asks everyone for the permission of showing ads before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
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.
643 comments
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.
> 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
They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with Apple providing meaningful competition.
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.
> There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub.
You’re pointing to something entirely different: those are Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they’re buying into.
OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of the creator (well I assume they did give their team member permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this kind of crap).
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.
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv...
We should not be using Copilot in the first place.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.
> 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.
I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
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.
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
>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.
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?
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 in code examples and proposed solutions."
How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if it's already happening?
> 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.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark
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.
> "We won't do something like this again."
They (Microsoft / GitHub) will do it again. Do not be fooled.
Never ever trust them because their words are completely empty and they will never change.
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.
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.
But I'm also paying the plan. Theres something odd about a tool which i paid for using my output to AD itself.
How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I suspect.
A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This could lead to very bad things.
One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not good.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Unless you're big enough like Meta, Microsoft, etc.
Brought to you by Wendy's.
-Sent from my iPhone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575212
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
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.
1.5M records of PRs affected. Does Microsoft copilot ask users for the permission of adding ads inside their PRs before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
Now EVERYONE can see ads disguised as PRs on GitHub. Does Microsoft asks everyone for the permission of showing ads before actually doing the thing? Do users show their consents on this matter?
Good taste Microslop.
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.