15 years later, Microsoft morged my diagram
Source: Hacker News
A few days ago, people started tagging me on Bluesky and Hacker News about a diagram on Microsoft’s Learn portal. It looked… familiar.
In 2010 I wrote A successful Git branching model and created a diagram to accompany it. I designed that diagram in Apple Keynote, obsessing over the colors, the curves, and the layout until it clearly communicated how branches relate to each other over time. I also published the source file so others could build on it. Since then the diagram has spread everywhere: books, talks, blog posts, team wikis, and YouTube videos. I never minded—sharing knowledge and letting the internet take it by storm was the whole point.
What I did not expect was for Microsoft, a trillion‑dollar company, some 15+ years later, to apparently run the diagram through an AI image generator and publish the result on their official Learn portal, without any credit or link back to the original.
Microsoft’s AI‑generated version
The AI‑generated image is not only ugly; it feels careless and amateurish. The carefully crafted visual language of the original—the branch colors, lane design, and dot‑and‑bubble alignment that made it readable—has been muddled into a laughable form. Arrows are missing or point in the wrong direction, and the obvious “continvoucly morged” text gives it away as a cheap AI artifact. It retains the rough shape of my diagram, enough that people recognized it and called Microsoft out.
Reaction and concerns
Seeing so many people upset was oddly reassuring. The “continvoucly morged” meme spread quickly—thanks, internet! 😄
Beyond the humor, the situation is saddening. It’s not the fact that a company used my diagram; the diagram has been public for 15 years and I’ve always been fine with that. What’s disheartening is the lack of process and care: taking someone’s carefully crafted work, running it through a machine to wash off the fingerprints, and shipping it as your own. This isn’t inspiration; it’s a degradation of something that already worked.
It’s also worrying that this case was easy to spot because the original diagram is well‑known. As AI‑generated content becomes more sophisticated, plagiarism may become harder to recognize.
What I would like
- A simple link back and attribution to the original article would be a good start.
- I would be interested in understanding how this Learn page at Microsoft was created, what the goals were, and why there appears to be no proofreading for a learning resource used by many developers.
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