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I was wondering why I was seeing so many "Co-authored-by: Copilot" commits recently. It turns out VS Code added a "feature" that inserts that into your commits automatically, even if you're not using Copilot.

It looks like people complained about this, which went nowhere until this hit the front page of HN. After this was the top HN story Saturday, an MS engineer submitted a PR to switch this feature to default off an hour ago (midnight Redmond time).

What will they think of next?

@danluu They will bake ads into FLOSS apps and websites: "Use Microsoft services for better experience! Leave free software now!"

@danluu Don't worry, someone from the relevant team at GitHub has said on HN that they "won't do it again".

(Someone else on HN has started a betting market on it, heh.)

@danluu PRs containing ads should get closed automatically with no examination and the initiator should be blocked. They are spam.

@danluu

@danluu Well, the usual monetization cycle is ads -> porn -> crime.

@danluu it always did that. At first it was just advertising a survey, that would put you on a raffle to win some free copilot credits. Now that this offer is over, they moved to this more generic message. But it is like that since day 0, and only for copilot authored/assigned prs. They are not doing any of that (yet?) for human authored/assigned prs

@danluu
Clammy Sammy already told us: “AI” porn.

@danluu Suckers getting suckered. 🤷

@danluu I would usually act surprised, because this is the WTF to end all WTF’s.. 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

That’s icky.

@danluu Let's just hope they haven't seen the film of A Clockwork Orange...

@danluu they are just so lame

@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?

@danluu H'mmm.

I've responded (to one instance). But it's not only Copilot that is guilty of these frivolous HELLO WORLD pull requests.

Here's #Claude doing one:
https://github.com/DataDog/datadog-agent/pull/47763

Here's a bot called devin-ai-integration doing one:
https://github.com/COG-GTM/ETL-Pipeline/pull/50

Here's a bot called kiro-agent doing one:
https://github.com/Moebats/hello-world/pull/2

It seems(?) that bots can only attack in this way if you have authorised them on your account. Go to https://github.com/settings/applications and revoke!

@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

https://github.com/canonical/traefik-k8s-operator/pull/580

@danluu 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

@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?

@danluu you'd think the'd have the technology to make this more sneaky and personalized than copying/pasting the same message to 11000 people