HN Reader

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.

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 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.

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.

It's surreal.

How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?

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.

> 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?

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 found the Copilot-generated commit message suggestions distracting when editing files from the web, so I made a uBlock Origin filter to block this feature:

  ||api.individual.githubcopilot.com/agents/github-commit-message-generation$xhr,domain=github.com

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'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?

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.

> 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 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'm all for getting away from GitHub, but Codeberg is a terrible name. Sounds like it's owned by Scrooge McDuck.

Is it on by default for end user repos? It appears to be disabled by default for organizations.

In the organization:

Organization -> Settings -> Copilot -> Access... Turn it off.

These anti-agentic coding nut jobs are going to get themselves thrown out of the industry. STFU, some of us are working.

I went to https://codeberg.org/

Move to alternatives then, it won't be easy but it'll be worth it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

ctrl+shift+p > Chat: Hide AI Features

in vscode

cant wait for the forced teams integration

This is very interesting... I've just learned about Codeberg. Does anyone have any info on it?

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 ;)

I love GitHub copilot.

Hear me here for a second: what if... what if, on every single bot post people just commented for the bot to go and suck a big fat.. you know what And then lock the conversation maybe the bot would learn something, eventually?

Sometimes i wonder why this hasn't happened anyway: Internet's not what it used to be.

And maybe companies would eventually take a clue, after they banned all actual contributors for having foul fingers (very unlikely i know)

thanks for attending my ted talk

Seriously just screw Microsoft. Screw their ceo. Blatant parasites

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.