> Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
> Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your project management tool.
Honestly, it being a "tip" or "ad" is exactly the same.
What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and accept that it's not an ad, and I can just about see from a certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe that, it's still completely unacceptable.
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?
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?
I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's. We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
So I think they’re injecting this as a tip on using Copilot, that just happens to be their integration with Raycast.
I have no idea what their actual partnership with Raycast looks like, maybe this is part of what they offered them? But it’s not a traditional link to another product ad like it appears to be from Raycast being a link.
It's time to make some money with Copilot and one way to do that is with partnerships.
GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
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?
Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
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.
That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
That’s not implementing it by accident, that’s deliberate. In such a scenario perhaps the deployment was a mistake, but if you don’t write the malware in the first place, it can’t be deployed. (Probably. This is LLM stuff we’re talking about.)
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
Back in the day, it was useful, as in, "Expect awkward phrasing and unintended effects of autocorrection, because mobile device. This message doesn't necessarily reflect the intent of the sender." (Considerate users would/could edit the signature to something w/o a product name in it.) Nowadays, this is pretty much the norm and no explicit warning ist required anymore.
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
>Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst.
Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.
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.
It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency. With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and there is no good way to show it to the user.
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.
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.
“tehe, just a miwtake xsxd UwU” was good enough to justify killing 150 schoolchildren. This is not the first or frankly even a remotely relevant milestone to anything, but even if it were, there's a 0% chance it would move the needle on anything considering what already gets excused. Anything is fine if you call it an accident.
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 ...
Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git repository.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out. Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot or GitHub here is not justified.
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
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.
sed fixes typos faster. The absurd part is watching devs burn prod tokens on glorifed autocorrect, wait through LLM lag for a spelling fix, and then act shocked when the output comes back as word salad with a coupon code glued to the end.
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and if there's a human in the loop approving the change, certainly they can fix the typo themself.
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
As much as AI using a lot of energy, having something that fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net saving if you consider the number of users who fail to complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a broken state or retry later.
It's probably using less energy than a person fixing the issue too. That's a guess though.
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 path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected by Raycast.
This is real. I do not have access to the path of reasoning, this ran through the GitHub copilot app which does not grant you access to the chain of thought.
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
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.
What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and accept that it's not an ad, and I can just about see from a certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe that, it's still completely unacceptable.
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?
So I think they’re injecting this as a tip on using Copilot, that just happens to be their integration with Raycast.
I have no idea what their actual partnership with Raycast looks like, maybe this is part of what they offered them? But it’s not a traditional link to another product ad like it appears to be from Raycast being a link.
GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.
(That said I’m rather skeptical of this and would like to see more details of the process that produced this, and proof.)
Edit: Just noticed this official GitHub blog post from last month advertising Raycast, making this story a lot more believable: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-17-assign-issues-to-co...
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.
z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.
But it really seems like an own goal if true.
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
I'm reminded of Jay Mohr's legendary take some years back on the creepy Carl's Jr. commercials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJlYRS2Vqkw
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
(sure, I was working on something embedded, and asked for a recommendation, but it seemed quite intent that it wanted me to use that specific board)
^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this context.
No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.
Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the notification.
If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.
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.
See you on neural links before “sponsored thoughts”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)
Ray casting, however, is different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
Brought to you by Wendy's.
"Sent from my iPhone"?
time is money, save both. try ramp.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
Edit: The link in the promotion goes to https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
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.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches
As much as AI using a lot of energy, having something that fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net saving if you consider the number of users who fail to complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a broken state or retry later.
It's probably using less energy than a person fixing the issue too. That's a guess though.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.