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 (if you search for other ad strings, you can find the rate of other ads)
What will they think of next?
@mahryekuh or maybe the tokens are too expensive to waste them on ads
@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.
@danluu hey look what was posted 10 days ago
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-20-monitor-copilot-coding-agent-logs-live-in-raycast/
@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.
@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
Automated action to fetch the latest minor and major versions of all charm libraries used by this charm. The branch of this PR will be overwritten during the next check. Unless you really know what...
@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 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 Oh, it's going to be ads everywhere. Ads in code comments. Ads in email summaries. Ads in meeting transcriptions. Ads in college admissions essays.
One of the marketing benefits of LLM use is that it turns you and your daily activities into a Trojan horse for ads.
@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 that claim, heh.)
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