🦔 GitHub Copilot has been injecting ads into pull request descriptions at scale. Over 1.5 million pull requests on GitHub now contain some form of Copilot advertisement, with more than 1,000 injections per day over the past ten days promoting tools like Raycast, Jira, Linear, VS Code, and JetBrains. A GitHub team member confirmed the practice on Hacker News and said they have now disabled it. It is not yet clear whether this was an intentional monetization test or something that got out of hand.
My Take
A pull request is a developer's technical contribution to a software project. It is not an ad unit. Microsoft tested injecting promotional content into 1.5 million of them without announcement and only stopped when it went public. That sequence is the part worth paying attention to.
Microsoft is having its worst start to a year this century, froze hiring in cloud and sales last week, and is carrying billions in OpenAI losses that need to be offset somewhere. When the core product starts looking for ad revenue inside developer workflows, that is not a sign of confidence in the underlying business model. The more pointed question, raised by several developers already, is straightforward. If Copilot is already comfortable modifying the metadata of your pull requests without telling you, what else is it comfortable modifying without telling you.
Hedgie🤗