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Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been independently confirmed?

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(comment deleted)
Todays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft — Empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Seriously? Dont they want their system to succeed? I cant think of a better way of alienating the target customer than 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.

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 ...
Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be advertising for Raycast?

Brought to you by Wendy's.

Presumably you need to pay raycast once for a setup operation while you need to pay constantly for copilot. Why wouldn't you advertise for someone who makes you more money at the same time as advertising for yourself?
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?
If they show the ad on github.com, agents accessing the PR using (an outdated, ad-free version of) gh CLI won’t see it.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...

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.
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.

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.

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.

(comment deleted)
Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.
Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake", "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never removed.
MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.
M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work anywhere big
Its like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive.

time is money, save both. try ramp.

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.
Because people using LLMs get lazy and can't event type normal text themselves anymore.
But... why?
(comment deleted)
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
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 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.
> But “sent from iPhone” is sometimes useful,

No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.

It is useful. It tells me that the sender isn't tech savvy and/or likes to show that they prefer expensive apple products. It is like carrying a Prada or Ray-Ban.

It also tells me that they probably don't care about second hand embarrassment.

And it tells me that they checked my email while away from keyboard, which means they are hard working individuals who care about business, but not enough to rush to a computer to reply properly.

Lots of social ques on that one.

"Sent from iPhone" doesn't contain a call to action, and doesn't exalt the features of the product.
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"

"Our affiliate solution partner"
Why are they doing this?
(comment deleted)
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.

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.

as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to me.
It was only a matter of time.

Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk

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?
Post the trajectory if this is real.
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).

I notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI tools too. It's awful.