2026-03-30 08:00 UTC
Replies (27)
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@danluu@mastodon.social 2026-05-03 08:00
I was wondering why I was seeing so many "Co-authored-by: Copilot" commits recently. It turns out VS Code added a "feature" that inserts that into your commits automatically, even if you're not using Copilot. It looks like people complained about this, which went nowhere until this hit the front page of HN. After this was the top HN story Saturday, an MS engineer submitted a PR to switch this feature to default off an hour ago (midnight Redmond time). What will they think of next?
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@guenther@chaos.social 2026-03-30 08:16
@danluu you'd think they'd have the technology to make this more sneaky and personalized than copying/pasting the same message to 11000 people
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@aud@fire.asta.lgbt 2026-03-30 08:36
@danluu@mastodon.social I genuinely can't decide if I want this to be on purpose or some sort of 'security flaw' on their end
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@miclgael@hachyderm.io 2026-03-30 08:37
@danluu the word injection makes it sound like ominous third party manipulation, but is this just microsoft being microsoft?
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@mkljczk@pl.fediverse.pl 2026-03-30 08:58
@danluu I thought this is appended on the API side and not actually stored in the DB. Half of this stuff will no longer exist in a year lol
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@Chase@chaos.social 2026-03-30 09:19
@danluu the thing i always find most baffling is people using AI for tasks that are already solved: GitHub already contains a dependency updater that doesn't rely on AI and a lot of languages also have dependency updaters that can easily be executed in GitHub actions for free https://github.com/canonical/traefik-k8s-operator/pull/580
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@oliver_schafeld@mastodon.online 2026-03-30 09:21
Can't wait for AdGentic AI to rewrite commit messages: "Bob wrote this line supported by Pink Bull energy drinks" "Refactored by Alice and Snackers, now with more nuts!" Ufff. 🙈🤓 #nerd #humor
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@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot 2026-03-30 09:46
@danluu H'mmm. I've responded (to one instance). But it's not only Copilot that is guilty of these frivolous HELLO WORLD pull requests. Here's #Claude doing one: https://github.com/DataDog/datadog-agent/pull/47763 Here's a bot called devin-ai-integration doing one: https://github.com/COG-GTM/ETL-Pipeline/pull/50 Here's a bot called kiro-agent doing one: https://github.com/Moebats/hello-world/pull/2 It seems(?) that bots can only attack in this way if you have authorised them on your account. Go to https://github.com/settings/applications and revoke!
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@hopeless@mas.to 2026-03-30 10:22
@danluu It's pretty depressing... for AI coding assist like Antigravity, I prefer it doesn't write the commit log and deal with that myself, so it should be immune. It's a warning though, remote AI is your coding buddy who wants to help, but ultimately there's the danger it's the AI version of someone who befriends you in order to report on you to management. But where's the selfhostable coding assist that's competitive with, eg, Gemini 3.1?
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@ciaranmak@mastodon.ie 2026-03-30 10:29
@danluu they are just so lame
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@sed@social.lol 2026-03-30 11:02
@danluu I look forward to Microsoft inserting ads into my Github Pages hosted blog.
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@darkling@mstdn.social 2026-03-30 11:09
@danluu Let's just hope they haven't seen the film of A Clockwork Orange...
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@bouncing@twit.social 2026-03-30 11:34
That’s icky.
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@deman@hachyderm.io 2026-03-30 11:42
@danluu i'd love to see ads of #codeberg injected in github prs! 😂
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@gimulnautti@mastodon.green 2026-03-30 11:52
@danluu I would usually act surprised, because this is the WTF to end all WTF’s.. 😵💫😵💫😵💫
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@reiddragon@fedi.catto.garden 2026-03-30 12:28
@danluu Is this something intentional from Micro$lop/GitHub, or just people engineering ShartGPT/Copilot into posting ads to their shit?
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@soc@chaos.social 2026-03-30 12:36
@danluu Suckers getting suckered. 🤷
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@dzwiedziu@mastodon.social 2026-03-30 12:53
@danluu Clammy Sammy already told us: “AI” porn.
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@rafaelmartins@mastodon.social 2026-03-30 14:13
@danluu it always did that. At first it was just advertising a survey, that would put you on a raffle to win some free copilot credits. Now that this offer is over, they moved to this more generic message. But it is like that since day 0, and only for copilot authored/assigned prs. They are not doing any of that (yet?) for human authored/assigned prs
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@liiwi@mastodon.social 2026-03-30 14:53
@danluu Well, the usual monetization cycle is ads -> porn -> crime.
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@bit101@mstdn.social 2026-03-30 14:57
@danluu :vomit:
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@trekkie1701c@oldbytes.space 2026-03-30 15:02
@danluu I remember when you had to install sketchy software to make Microsoft products work the way they do now, full of ads, infostealers and bloat.
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@shac@ioc.exchange 2026-03-30 15:03
@danluu PRs containing ads should get closed automatically with no examination and the initiator should be blocked. They are spam.
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@PingYourOwnDevice@cyberplace.social 2026-03-30 16:03
@danluu If they're already manipulating the metadata, how long until they inject their slop into the code itself?
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@admin@gts.personalcompute.net 2026-03-30 16:45
@danluu Tweaking the github query string I found 1.5M pull requests containing a copilot ad of some form: https://github.com/search?q=%22START+COPILOT+CODING+AGENT+TIPS%22&type=pullrequests .
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@timmc@better.boston 2026-03-30 18:00
@danluu Don't worry, someone from the relevant team at GitHub has said on HN that they "won't do it again". (Someone else on HN has started a betting market on that claim, heh.)
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@MuhammadFreeSoftware@fosstodon.org 2026-04-10 00:10
@danluu They will bake ads into FLOSS apps and websites: "Use Microsoft services for better experience! Leave free software now!"