Discussion

Copilot Edited an Ad Into My PR

daemin: 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.

onion2k: 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.

post_below: 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'd 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.

with: 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.I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal?

WD-42: 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?

pants2: Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast?Brought to you by Wendy's.

LeoPanthera: This comment is shockingly ableist.

hexasquid: 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 ...

dinakernel: Seriously? Dont they want their system to succeed? I cant think of a better way of alienating the target customer than this.

napo: I wonder if 1) the PR was created using Raycast and this is the model signing its PR, or 2) if there was some prompt injection done at some point.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.

simonw: Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.

nialse: Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed?Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.

longislandguido: > 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

martianlantern: Why are they doing this?

ex-aws-dude: How long before the AI makes sponsored decisions in the actual implementation?"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and added an API call using today's sponsor MongoDB"

anshumankmr: One more step closer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c

Joel_Mckay: Even simple vector search with LLMs are actually fairly robust at handling grammatical errata. =3"Brought to you by Carl's Jr."

pabrams: 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.

goodusername: Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.But it really seems like an own goal if true.

turtleyacht: Do you drive by a billboard that reads Does advertising work? Just did! Raycast is an application launcher thing:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)Ray casting, however, is different:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_castingBrought to you by Burger King.

pinkmuffinere: 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

silisili: 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?

khvirabyan: 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?

chrismorgan: How could you implement something like this by accident?

bigyabai: LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.

hsbauauvhabzb: It was only a matter of time.Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk

flogy: 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.

Joel_Mckay: 60% sure it is probably an April fools day joke, but still funny even if its true. =3"Brought to you by Carl's Jr."

Joel_Mckay: 60% sure it is probably an April fools day joke, but still funny even if its true. =3"Brought to you by Carl's Jr."

Surac: as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.

hsbauauvhabzb: 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

SchemaLoad: 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.

hsbauauvhabzb: It’s probably a useful feature: if it’s named copilot, assume it’s slop and avoid it.

Joel_Mckay: Money...60% sure it is probably an April fools day joke, but still funny even if its true. =3"Brought to you by Carl's Jr."

GN0515: But... why?

Joel_Mckay: Money...60% sure it is probably an April fools day joke, but still funny even if its true. =3"Brought to you by Carl's Jr."

tossandthrow: Likely already happening.

tossandthrow: 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.

oefrha: 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.)

pabrams: Why are you "summoning copilot" to correct a typo?

MattGaiser: 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.

protocolture: >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.

charcircuit: 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.

MattGaiser: Post the trajectory if this is real.

sheept: 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

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

ex-aws-dude: Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at allIn fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches

gherkinnn: 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.

MattGaiser: It could simply be something in the Raycast integraton?

oefrha: I said it’s more believable than GitHub randomly advertising a non-GitHub product (my initial read of the situation, which seemed highly unlikely).

1una: Seems like it: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...

annie511266728: 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.

ValentineC: "Microsoft Remote Desktop" was such a good and distinct name. RIP.

vcryan: 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.

raincole: Is Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing the first large scale prompt injection abuse?

iomer: crappy much. wow.

ookblah: maybe every PR should be run through 2 other llms so they just remove the ads of competitors (or i guess you'll end up with all 3) /s

oakpond: I notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI tools too. It's awful.

boredpudding: Confirmation seems to be here: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...

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

bryanhogan: 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.

SV_BubbleTime: 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”.

icar: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

anton-g: Well, you are not alone: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...

prodigycorp: Doing that was my first instinct as well.. 11,300 PRs is certainly no mistake. It's got me thinking, given that people have these agents running on their local machines, doesn't it seem like a trivial attack vector to have some bot injecting commenting on these PRs with a cleverly devised prompt to either exfil data or to inject malware?At least one agent's gotta bite, no?

computomatic: 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.

rhet0rica: That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.

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

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

mavamaarten: 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.

politelemon: > But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.

raincole: A few decades? Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.

jruohonen: > 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.

politelemon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.

mathieudombrock: LLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing.Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.

pavo-etc: I would argue that is a net positive, it is valuable to know if a language model was involved enough to be committing itself.

gpvos: 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.

MattGaiser: 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.

pavo-etc: 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.

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

anton-g: 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...

politelemon: Child comments here indicates its from Ray cast, and the messaging appears on gitlab too.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820

pavo-etc: Raycast is a macOS only product, can't imagine why Microsoft would want to promote it. Could be dataset poisoning or prompt injection

isoprophlex: 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.

heavyset_go: You can use Copilot with Gitlab

Brosper: It's baked in literally into every coding tutorial and is kind of industry standard, like JIRA. Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.

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

logicallee: Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

bryanhogan: 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.

connorgurney: Indeed. I can’t see why Copilot would promote an unrelated third-party service…

upmostly: Isn't this the same as"Sent from my iPhone"?

marcus_holmes: I believe Codeberg is the new hotness

steve1977: It is, but Codeberg is only for free and open source projects.

ZeroGravitas: Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.

starkeeper: 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.

deredede: GitHub (still) allows you to edit files directly in the browser without using AI.

rob74: ...a non-GitHub and non-Microsoft product.

heavyset_go: 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.