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> 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

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.

If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase itself with Copilot.

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).

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.

Microsoft would probably seriously refer to it as 'just the tip'.

You'll never guess what happens next.

(Hint: everyone knows what happens next)

It's definitely an ad, I think the only real question is whether it's just marketing Copilot or whether part of their partnership with other companies is advertising the integration in this way. The links all go to Copilot docs pages on the integrations, so they're not typical tracked link advertising campaigns.

This does not look like random chance. It's a pattern of behavior.

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.

A bit like "suggested apps" in the start menu. It's "suggestions" and certainly not paid ads.

This tip/ad discussion reminds me of the equally idiotic and misleading Facebook post types. Instead of the correctly labeling all ads as, well, ads, Facebook have some ads called "suggested for you", some are completely unlabeled with only a "follow" button to start following, some ads are labeled as "sponsored" etc. I think they are doing this to evade legal limitations they might have otherwise. Last time I used Facebook it showed me 25 ads in a row (I counted), without any of my hundreds of follows with active feeds. Truly insane company.

It is clearly an ad, no doubt about that.

> Looks like MS really want to "give tips"

Including Windows, File Explorer, Start Menu, ...

It seems with the latest "ok we went too far" Win11 patch though, they got some tips back from their users.

It's an interesting model, makes me wonder if prolific open source contributors do it ("leave a tip if you like this MR" kind of thing).

You just text replaced Ad with Tip, it’s still an ad

New age clippy no one wants but M$lop

> Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad.

No, they don't.

> edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for MS.

You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it intentionally as such?

That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that isn't one of them.

> 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.

> 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. ;)

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.

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.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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

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?

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

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.

"We won't do something like this again"

Sureeeeee

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.

Hi Tim,

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

Huge miss. Again. And again. And again.

Thank you for listening.

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

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

Shockingly poor judgment.

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

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.

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.

“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-copilo...

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> 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 ?

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.

> We won't do something like this again.

It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.

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

> 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!

[flagged]

OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do this.

Looks like you can disable it though:

https://github.com/settings/copilot/features

-> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"

Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?

Looks like there's a comment added by Copilot before any of these "tips" as well, so pretty sure this originates from Copilot and not Raycast: https://github.com/search?q=%22START+COPILOT+CODING+AGENT+TI...

What an absolute mess. It's like some dystopian future where a man is laying in a casket, nearly dead, and on the casket's ceiling, inches from his face, is a screen with an ad blaring to drink more Diet Fanta.

Demand it be made illegal. Vote, especially during primaries, and almost never for an incumbent.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820

I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.

If they show the ad on github.com, agents accessing the PR using (an outdated, ad-free version of) gh CLI won’t see it. /s

(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...

Yes. The same message in GitLab: https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/thomasvermeule/GeneralAviationAirc...

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.

Seems like it: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...

Yes, it seems very unlikely this is Copilot rather than Raycast, short of some very unexpected weirdness. I cling to that hope, anyway.

Claude is absolutely in love with github actions.

It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets. However, it keeps recommending it.

I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd to the punch with these tips.

> 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

Todays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft — Empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Likely already happening.

"Our affiliate solution partner"

It's a setting that causes an extra prompt to be placed into the system prompt.

It's possible they are safeguarding for possible future changes of copyright law that would give Microsoft copyright over all Copilot contributions. This may sound paranoid but, as far as I know, exactly who counts as an "AI operator", how much authorship an "AI operator" has, and who gets copyright, or whether AI contributions are even in the public domain, are legally untested and unclear issues.

No it's just that those commits aren't copyrightable and they probably want to reuse them in the future.

> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,

No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.

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.

That's exactly where my mind went. It's zero percent more insulting to me than 'sent from my iPhone.'

If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?

"Sent from iPhone" doesn't contain a call to action, and doesn't exalt the features of the product.

It already does that, too, with the co-author

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.

funny enough I have a page just for tracking this also https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/

Because people using LLMs get lazy and can't event type normal text themselves anymore.

I actually like that I don't have to leave Github to deal with various feedback, especially if I switched branches already to do other work.

Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.

How could you implement something like this by accident?

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.

It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.

If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.

Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.

M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big

Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.

But it really seems like an own goal if true.

MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.

I don't know how Raycast could run on the GitHub servers, but a third option could be dataset poisoning. Hostile raycast advertising campaign

What does AI have to do with it?

If not on the surface, we’re all deep down aware that an initial era of an advertising-free new technology is once again almost over.

See you on neural links before “sponsored thoughts”.

"We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who were present to see this, not every current and future employee of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organization or institution as a person, but as lots of individual people, constantly joining and leaving the group.

To play devil’s advocate^, wouldn’t it be plagiarism if it didn’t?

^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this context.

Presumably you need to pay raycast once for a setup operation while you need to pay constantly for copilot. Why wouldn't you advertise for someone who makes you more money at the same time as advertising for yourself?

You could argue this is in keeping with consumer trends, unfortunately.

"Endorsing products is the American way to express individuality."

Calvin noticed it 30+ years ago.

You can disable it. It's annoying wf.

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

this can be disabled with a setting: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...

I think people read it as cheap advertising because a PR isn't really the tool's output, it's team communication.

A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.

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.

This comment is shockingly ableist.

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.

What do you mean with trajectory? Also, a simple github search will show you many hits for the Raycast text, proving that this is quite real.