Advertisement or tip?: GitHub Copilot added product tips to pull requests
GitHub Copilot "helped" with pull requests by unsolicitedly providing tips on commercial products. GitHub has since disabled this behavior.
(Image: Everett Collection / Shutterstock)
GitHub Copilot embedded unsolicited product tips in pull requests that clearly look like advertising. These supposedly friendly tips are found not only in pull requests created by Copilot but also in those that the AI assistant merely edited. Following surprise and protests, GitHub has now deactivated this behavior.
Bug fix with advertising bonus
On March 30, developer Zach Manson published a screenshot of a pull request where Copilot was supposed to correct typos and which contained an additional tip after the correction: “Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast”. Copilot kindly provided a link to the productivity tool for the word Raycast.
Developer Zach Manson posted a screenshot of the enhanced pull request.
(Image:Â Zach Manson)
Zach Manson's pull request was not an isolated case: A search on GitHub shows the same tip in about 11,000 pull requests.
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Over 1.5 million pull requests and GitLab also affected
Apparently, Raycast did not even commission the advertising itself. An article on Neowin shows that the hidden HTML comment “START COPILOT CODING AGENT TIPS” can be found in the Markdown for the pull request.
Neowin found similar “tips” for other products in a total of 1.5 million pull requests and discovered the Raycast tip not only on GitHub but also in merge requests edited by Copilot on GitLab. “Useful tips” were also provided for integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams, as well as for starting Copilot tasks directly from editors like VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, and Eclipse.
No more unsolicited tips
GitHub has since backtracked. On Hacker News, Tim Rogers from the Copilot Coding Agent team wrote that the pull requests no longer contain tips. “We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do something like this again.”
On X, Martin Woodward from GitHub's Developer Relations team wrote that the tips were originally intended for pull requests created entirely by Copilot and were acceptable then, but it became unpleasant when Copilot interfered with every PR it touched.
(rme)
