They were allowed to buy it because GitHub is not licensed with an FOSS licence. How on earth did we all settle on such a propietary piece of tech infrastructure? No wonder Microsoft bought it.
Is this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and
> the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories.
but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it.
I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copilot` user but I looked at this users repos and their most popular one has a total of 3 PRs with no Copilot ones.
I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs.
People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now.
And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.
This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.
Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
I recently got access to the premium version through work and was able to prototype something super legit in a language I don't really code in. It requires a heavy understanding of Linux and I had to rephrase my prompts in a "high level" way. However the result would have taken weeks and I was able to do it in a few days.
That said I would have a hard time justifying paying for it for my personal life because it's really that expensive. I look forward to 10 years from now when the local ML is good enough or free.
> During Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users.
Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.
I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.
I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.
As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to.
I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised.
I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.
Whether or not Github themselves create these issues or pull-requests, some bunch of folks will do that (manually) for sure. I mean the Hacktoberfest is coming soon, so is the low-quality typo-fixes.
Since now there is Claude-Code, Cursor et. al, I am really curious how people are gonna fight with the pull-request spam. Especially open-source projects which claim they do not accept LLM generated content.
P.S: Most people just do it either to "light-up" their Github profile for job applications or just to get cheap swag...
Corporate overreach like this happens if most open source developers no longer speak up because they want to be hired or retain their positions. They delude themselves if they think that attitude provides them any security. The opposite is the case: corporations will use the sycophants, secretly laugh about them and fire them if they have served their purpose. As in the case of the Google and Microsoft firings of Python core developers.
I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.
You're 100% correct. People love tools which make them more productive. If AI was actually as good as the companies pushing it claim it is, they wouldn't have to push it.
Yes, this is what’s happening. I think it pretty well speaks for itself. It’s almost entirely hype. It’s got significant utility, just nowhere near enough utility to justify its astronomical costs and wastefulness.
> if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.
Yes! "Forced features" are a misguided effort to drive internal usage metrics. There are other ways to let users know about new features, short of forcing it on them obnoxiously.
> The second most popular discussion – where popularity is measured in upvotes – is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews.
From the discussion:
> Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories
> ... This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct¹.
> Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature.
How does one see that a user, e.g. "chickenpants" submitted an issue or PR that was generated by "Copilot"? Isn't there only one creator?
Github is my push --mirror location, nothing more. Main is a popular Gitlab instance gitgud.io, and I host my own secondary mirror.
Gitlab is of course adding more AI and corpo garbage, and once they prevent disabling these "features" on community editions we'll see a fork of gitlab, probably.
The assertion that github is some bustling hub of opportunity is a strange one. At best you get people more likely to contribute because they already signed up, and a contribution from somebody not willing to sign up to another free service or simply email you an issue report is a contribution worth missing.
What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats?
It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this.
Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tireless junior intern who had memorized the entire Internet is actually useful.
> What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats?
It's propping up the US economy and businesses mostly look at B2B signals. Keeping "demand" for AI high at e.g., Microsoft, keeps "demand" high on NVIDIA, CoreWeave, et al.
All of the boats are floating in the bathtub and nobody wants to be the one to pull the drain plug.
Tangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars.
They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges.
I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between github/gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut/gitea is near identical.
I never understood going by stars when there's a much stronger signal in how many issues are being tracked and closed. Very easy to see if its software people actually use
I've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user.
They keep closing the ticket and saying it's "with the engineering team". I keep reopening and asking for resolution, escalation, or progress.
GitHub did have working and professional support in the past but in 2025 they are just malicious.
I'm getting quite sick of how it is forced on you. It's not just yet-another useful feature, they are shoveling it into everything, and giving it the most prominent place possible.
I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console.
A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
Just put anybody who PRs AI slop to any repo on a big, collaborative blocklist so we can all block them and move on with our lives. They would be PRing AI slop with or without Copilot integrations anyway.
can someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos?
it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
I’m a soon-to-be-ex-VSCode user, but seeing the long march of Copilot (Clippy 2.0, except it steals my code) at Github and now VSCode, I’m taking the plunge and learning Emacs.
I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow.
On bigger PRs, I regularly have diffs that take seconds to load. The actions also started hanging a lot more often and will run for 30 minutes stuck in some kind of loop unless they time out or I cancel them manually. This did not use to happen before or least not as frequently as now.
Finally when I try to cancel the hung actions, the cancel button never gets disabled after I click it and it is possible to click it multiple times without any effect. Once clicked, surely it shouldn't be possible to click it again unless the API calls failed.
Clearly there is a quality decrease happening here.
> I am not sure if it's just me but the Github UI has become incredibly slow.
Making things work properly is terribly passé in this brave new world of magic nonsense-generating robots.
You see this with Google Docs, too; after about a decade of stagnation, Google _finally_ started adding a few features (basic Markdown support, say, better comments, a few other bits and pieces) around 2022... And it finally got a bit less slow. But now that seems to have come to a shuddering halt; once more Docs stagnates, but it has about a hundred Gemini buttons now! It also feels like it's getting slower and buggier again.
isn't this typical Microsoft behavior? Just look at Windows and how many components are forced upon you. Try uninstalling it, it just comes right back. Most of it, you can't even uninstall. Some you can't even unpin. That's a monopoly for you. And they steal your documents by making OneDrive the default so they can train their AI. It's malicious.
For me Copilot keeps commenting something like "this changes typo in a documentation". The comment is now blocking automerge of the PR, so I have more work. I have to go to the PR and mark the comment as resolved. Thanks AI, thanks Microsoft, fantastic job burning electricity for this. At least Bitcoin created some value ;)
47 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 66.0 ms ] threadin vscode
> the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories.
but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it.
I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copilot` user but I looked at this users repos and their most popular one has a total of 3 PRs with no Copilot ones.
I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs.
And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.
This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.
Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
That said I would have a hard time justifying paying for it for my personal life because it's really that expensive. I look forward to 10 years from now when the local ML is good enough or free.
Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.
I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.
I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
I don't; any ideas what's different?
As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to. I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised. I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.
P.S: Most people just do it either to "light-up" their Github profile for job applications or just to get cheap swag...
Microsoft is a software company. They wouldn't have released this to begin with to have an extreme competitive edge!
Yes! "Forced features" are a misguided effort to drive internal usage metrics. There are other ways to let users know about new features, short of forcing it on them obnoxiously.
From the discussion:
> Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories
> ... This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct¹.
> Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature.
How does one see that a user, e.g. "chickenpants" submitted an issue or PR that was generated by "Copilot"? Isn't there only one creator?
Gitlab is of course adding more AI and corpo garbage, and once they prevent disabling these "features" on community editions we'll see a fork of gitlab, probably.
The assertion that github is some bustling hub of opportunity is a strange one. At best you get people more likely to contribute because they already signed up, and a contribution from somebody not willing to sign up to another free service or simply email you an issue report is a contribution worth missing.
It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this.
Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tireless junior intern who had memorized the entire Internet is actually useful.
It's propping up the US economy and businesses mostly look at B2B signals. Keeping "demand" for AI high at e.g., Microsoft, keeps "demand" high on NVIDIA, CoreWeave, et al.
All of the boats are floating in the bathtub and nobody wants to be the one to pull the drain plug.
They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges.
I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between github/gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut/gitea is near identical.
They keep closing the ticket and saying it's "with the engineering team". I keep reopening and asking for resolution, escalation, or progress.
GitHub did have working and professional support in the past but in 2025 they are just malicious.
It's surreal.
I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console.
A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
In the organization:
Organization -> Settings -> Copilot -> Access... Turn it off.
On bigger PRs, I regularly have diffs that take seconds to load. The actions also started hanging a lot more often and will run for 30 minutes stuck in some kind of loop unless they time out or I cancel them manually. This did not use to happen before or least not as frequently as now.
Finally when I try to cancel the hung actions, the cancel button never gets disabled after I click it and it is possible to click it multiple times without any effect. Once clicked, surely it shouldn't be possible to click it again unless the API calls failed.
Clearly there is a quality decrease happening here.
Making things work properly is terribly passé in this brave new world of magic nonsense-generating robots.
You see this with Google Docs, too; after about a decade of stagnation, Google _finally_ started adding a few features (basic Markdown support, say, better comments, a few other bits and pieces) around 2022... And it finally got a bit less slow. But now that seems to have come to a shuddering halt; once more Docs stagnates, but it has about a hundred Gemini buttons now! It also feels like it's getting slower and buggier again.