Interesting to see Copilot injecting ads into PR descriptions.

[danluu@mastodon.social]

Interesting to see Copilot injecting ads into PR descriptions. Although there are a handful of older instances of this, if GitHub search is working properly, it looks like this started happening at scale around 10 days ago with more than 1k injections of this particular ad per day since then

https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+copilot+coding+tasks+from+anywhere+on+your+macOS+or+Windows+machine+with+Raycast%22&type=pullrequests&s=created&o=asc&p=1

What will they think of next?

[guenther@chaos.social]

@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

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@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

[miclgael@hachyderm.io]

@danluu the word injection makes it sound like ominous third party manipulation, but is this just microsoft being microsoft?

[fi@chaos.social]

@danluu Interesting that it’s specifically linking to Raycast (a freemium Spotlight replacement productivity tool thing that started leaning into „AI“). I assume it’s Raycast injecting those ads when people use Copilot through it?

[nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt]

@miclgael @danluu Raycast is third party though

[miclgael@hachyderm.io]

@nina_kali_nina @danluu MS advertise lots of third party garbage in all their other UIs though?

[mkljczk@pl.fediverse.pl]

@danluu@mastodon.social 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

[mkljczk@pl.fediverse.pl]

@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt @miclgael@hachyderm.io @danluu@mastodon.social it links to github docs

[miclgael@hachyderm.io]

@nina_kali_nina @danluu interestingly I tried to scan a URL of one of the ads for malware and cloudflare refused 🫠

[imbl@social.treehouse.systems]

@danluu hey look what was posted 10 days ago

Monitor Copilot coding agent logs live in Raycast - GitHub Changelog

Raycast is a powerful free launcher for macOS and Windows. It can launch apps, search files, control your system, and leverage community-built extensions. With the GitHub Copilot extension for Raycast,…

The GitHub Blog (github.blog)

[miclgael@hachyderm.io]

@mkljczk @nina_kali_nina @danluu

I think the annoying thing for me is I can't tell if:

- Copilot inject ad now
- User found dodgy free tier wrapper around copilot that inject ad now
- Autonomously deployed AI bot farm for injecting ad inject ad now

Because all outputs look the same because Microsoft hold a gigantic foot cannon and aim it at the crater where their feet used to be, daily.

[chase@chaos.social]

@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

chore: update charm libraries by observability-noctua-bot · Pull Request #580 · canonical/traefik-k8s-operator

This charmed operator automates the operational procedures of running Traefik, an open-source application proxy. - chore: update charm libraries by observability-noctua-bot · Pull Request #580 · canonical/traefik-k8s-operator

GitHub (github.com)

[oliver_schafeld@mastodon.online]

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

[mahryekuh@hachyderm.io]

@guenther @danluu This is barely two weeks old, the sneaky will come eventually.

They're probably trying to see what they can get away with. Let's not accuse them of incompetence yet.

[miclgael@hachyderm.io]

@imbl @danluu funny marketing to have the example video not do anything except show a loading bar long enough for me to click away without learning about it.

I guess thats like Nintendo in their ads for Switch 2 being honest about low framerates and lag if you try to play Mario Kart World with friends.

[guenther@chaos.social]

@mahryekuh or maybe the tokens are too expensive to waste them on ads

@danluu

[mkljczk@pl.fediverse.pl]

@miclgael@hachyderm.io @nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt @danluu@mastodon.social can confirm this is simply what agentic PRs look like on copilot pro

[hopeless@mas.to]

@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?

[ciaranmak@mastodon.ie]

@danluu they are just so lame