GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash
Source: Hacker News
Microsoft has done a 180. Following backlash from developers, GitHub has removed Copilot’s ability to stick ads—what it calls “tips”—into any pull request that invokes its name.
Australian developer Zach Manson noted on Monday that, after a coworker asked Copilot to correct a typo in one of his pull requests, he was surprised to find a message from Copilot in the PR pushing readers to adopt productivity app Raycast.
“Quickly spin up Copilot coding agents from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast,” the note read with a lightning‑bolt emoji and a link to install Raycast.
Manson told The Register that he initially thought it might be “some kind of training data poisoning or novel prompt injection” or a proof‑of‑concept marketing effort by the Raycast team.
A quick search on GitHub shows more than 11 400 PRs with the same tip, all seemingly added by Copilot. Searching the code for the block that invokes Copilot to add a tip reveals many more examples of different tips being inserted.
Manson said he isn’t surprised to see GitHub do this with an AI model, but finds it offensive to have the Raycast ad inserted into his own PR as if he wrote it.
“I wasn’t even aware that the GitHub Copilot Review integration had the ability to edit other users’ descriptions and comments,” he told us. “I can’t think of a valid use case for that ability.”
GitHub backs down
It was only Monday morning when Microsoft watchers at Neowin picked up Manson’s report that Copilot was injecting what developers saw as ads into PRs. By the afternoon, GitHub had decided a recent change to Copilot may have gone too far.
GitHub VP of developer relations Martin Woodward explained in a post on X later that day that Copilot inserting ads into PRs isn’t new—it has been doing so in the PRs it creates for a while. Letting Copilot touch PRs it didn’t create, but is mentioned in, is the new behavior that “became icky.”
“When we added the ability to have Copilot work on any PR by mentioning it, the behaviour became icky,” Woodward said.
Tim Rogers, principal product manager for Copilot at GitHub, took to Hacker News on Monday to say that giving Copilot the ability to add “tips” to PRs was intended “to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow.”
After hearing community feedback, Rogers said that, on reflection, letting Copilot make changes to PRs written by a human without their knowledge “was the wrong judgement call.”
“We’ve now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so you won’t see this happen again,” Rogers added.
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Neither Microsoft nor GitHub responded to questions for this story.