> Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that comment was added by Raycast?
I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's. We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
It's time to make some money with Copilot and one way to do that is with partnerships.
GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?
Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.
If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.
That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is all open source and only open source.
Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
>Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst.
Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.
Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to just products even.
It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency. With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and there is no good way to show it to the user.
Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for blighted responses.
Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out. Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal communication between two people, only to find that some third party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git repository.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot or GitHub here is not justified.
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and if there's a human in the loop approving the change, certainly they can fix the typo themself.
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
As much as AI using a lot of energy, having something that fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net saving if you consider the number of users who fail to complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a broken state or retry later.
It's probably using less energy than a person fixing the issue too. That's a guess though.
I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
The path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected by Raycast.
This is real. I do not have access to the path of reasoning, this ran through the GitHub copilot app which does not grant you access to the chain of thought.
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
Well, you are not alone: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?
It's baked in literally into every coding tutorial and is kind of industry standard, like JIRA. Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.
I believe Codeberg is the new hotness
It is, but Codeberg is only for free and open source projects.
Check out https://codefloe.com for private repos hosted with Forgejo. It is also free and hosted in the EU.
A few decades? Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
> Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of spam.
Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more traction again.
Looks like there's a comment added by Copilot before any of these "tips" as well, so pretty sure this originates from Copilot and not Raycast: https://github.com/search?q=%22START+COPILOT+CODING+AGENT+TI...
Child comments here indicates its from Ray cast, and the messaging appears on gitlab too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
You can use Copilot with Gitlab
This "ad" is not exactly new. Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad. I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this.
https://github.com/PlagueHO/plagueho.github.io/pull/24#issue... Copilot has been adding "(emoji) (tip)" thing since May 2025. GitHub copilot was released in May 2025, so basically it has had an ad since beginning.
There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub. https://github.com/search?q=%22%3C%21--+START+COPILOT+CODING...
Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that comment was added by Raycast?
Yes. The same message in GitLab: https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/thomasvermeule/GeneralAviationAirc...
I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's. We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
Seems like it: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
Yes, it seems very unlikely this is Copilot rather than Raycast, short of some very unexpected weirdness. I cling to that hope, anyway.
Indeed. I can’t see why Copilot would promote an unrelated third-party service…
It's time to make some money with Copilot and one way to do that is with partnerships.
GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
[delayed]
Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider an ad.
Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn’t they… just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without risking another 9 of downtime?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.
Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
If they show the ad on github.com, agents accessing the PR using (an outdated, ad-free version of) gh CLI won’t see it. /s
(That said I’m rather skeptical of this and would like to see more details of the process that produced this, and proof.)
Edit: Just noticed this official GitHub blog post from last month advertising Raycast, making this story a lot more believable: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-17-assign-issues-to-co...
It could simply be something in the Raycast integraton?
I said it’s more believable than GitHub randomly advertising a non-GitHub product (my initial read of the situation, which seemed highly unlikely).
...a non-GitHub and non-Microsoft product.
Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably unintentional, mistake by MS.
If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a mea culpa.
That’s a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it reads very strongly like someone intended it.
How could you implement something like this by accident?
That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.
z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
One feasible scenario could be that they are working on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.
LLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers are capable of doing.
Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.
If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an ad added in.
Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.
Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to others as well.
But it really seems like an own goal if true.
Confirmation seems to be here: https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
Decision time, Western man: will you let the “tehe, just a miwtake xsxd UwU” slide or will you do something about? This is just a first pebble.
Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed?
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
> Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
I'm reminded of Jay Mohr's legendary take some years back on the creepy Carl's Jr. commercials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJlYRS2Vqkw
Todays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft — Empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
How long before the LLM makes sponsored decisions in the actual implementation?
"It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
Likely already happening.
To be fair, Gemini did try to get me to buy some nucleo144s recently...
(sure, I was working on something embedded, and asked for a recommendation, but it seemed quite intent that it wanted me to use that specific board)
I miss the good old days whem there were "hire me" ads in NPM installs.
I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its “sent from iPhone” addendums. But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at “edited with copilot” I think it would be tolerable
> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,
No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.
"Sent from iPhone" doesn't contain a call to action, and doesn't exalt the features of the product.
I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR, and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored by someone else - is downright rude.
> Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems bothered
Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the notification.
That's exactly where my mind went. It's zero percent more insulting to me than 'sent from my iPhone.'
If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use copilot to create or edit them?
It already does that, too, with the co-author
I would argue that is a net positive, it is valuable to know if a language model was involved enough to be committing itself.
This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is all open source and only open source.
Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products that share that name now.
Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a number of other things. None of these products/features have any relation to each other.
So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
>Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this has to be their worst.
Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about it.
"Microsoft Remote Desktop" was such a good and distinct name. RIP.
It’s probably a useful feature: if it’s named copilot, assume it’s slop and avoid it.
funny enough I have a page just for tracking this also https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/
People, we just solved the LLM watermarking problem.
I wonder if 1) the PR was created using Raycast and this is the model signing its PR, or 2) if there was some prompt injection done at some point.
Either of these options would still be bad, but here the author suggests that it's just copilot that now just injects ads in its output.
I don't know how Raycast could run on the GitHub servers, but a third option could be dataset poisoning. Hostile raycast advertising campaign
Why are you "summoning copilot" to correct a typo?
I actually like that I don't have to leave Github to deal with various feedback, especially if I switched branches already to do other work.
GitHub (still) allows you to edit files directly in the browser without using AI.
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to just products even.
If not on the surface, we’re all deep down aware that an initial era of an advertising-free new technology is once again almost over.
See you on neural links before “sponsored thoughts”.
It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency. With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and there is no good way to show it to the user.
Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for blighted responses.
Do you drive by a billboard that reads
Raycast is an application launcher thing:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)
Ray casting, however, is different:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
Isn’t this more of a Raycast issue (apparently an agentic ai service) instead of GH Copilot itself?
Isn't this the same as
"Sent from my iPhone"?
Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast?
Brought to you by Wendy's.
Is Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing the first large scale prompt injection abuse?
I notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI tools too. It's awful.
Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out. Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to do it.
I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal communication between two people, only to find that some third party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
Its like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive.
time is money, save both. try ramp.
as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.
Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git repository.
Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface with how the public views your product, service or company. In this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is referring to pull request as PR
This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot or GitHub here is not justified.
Edit: The link in the promotion goes to https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
It was only a matter of time.
Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
Why are they doing this?
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
If you do it manually, sure.
If you have an agent watching for code changes and automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that actually needs a person to think about it.
Given time all small changes will be done this way, and eventually there won't be a person reviewing them.
That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and if there's a human in the loop approving the change, certainly they can fix the typo themself.
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just use Claude for all my searches
Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at all
As much as AI using a lot of energy, having something that fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net saving if you consider the number of users who fail to complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a broken state or retry later.
It's probably using less energy than a person fixing the issue too. That's a guess though.
I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models from advertising themselves or taking credit.
Post the trajectory if this is real.
What do you mean with trajectory? Also, a simple github search will show you many hits for the Raycast text, proving that this is quite real.
The path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected by Raycast.
This is real. I do not have access to the path of reasoning, this ran through the GitHub copilot app which does not grant you access to the chain of thought.
One more step closer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c
crappy much. wow.
Seriously? Dont they want their system to succeed? I cant think of a better way of alienating the target customer than this.
Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you can disable it, it’s not the default to have it disabled. For some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the “Made with Cursor” into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which looks really stupid on a work PR.
I’m so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how do we not read this as cheap advertising?
I think people read it as cheap advertising because a PR isn't really the tool's output, it's team communication.
A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.
But... why?
maybe every PR should be run through 2 other llms so they just remove the ads of competitors (or i guess you'll end up with all 3) /s