After Copilot injected an ad into a pull request on GitHub, referencing Raycast, GitHub says it “disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback”
Windows CentralSean Endicott
Context & Ripple Effects
GitHub’s reversal follows backlash over a Copilot output appearing in a pull request with a Raycast reference. It is a trust-sensitive moment for a coding assistant whose outputs sit inside developers’ day-to-day review workflow.
The change also lands shortly after GitHub said Copilot interaction data, including inputs, outputs and code snippets, would be used for model training unless users opt out, as covered in its Copilot data-training policy. Together, the episodes make product governance—not only coding quality—part of the service’s value proposition.
First-order effects
GitHub has removed product tips from Copilot, eliminating that channel from pull-request interactions in response to user feedback.
Developers and teams regain a clearer separation between code-review assistance and product promotion; Raycast loses the incidental exposure created by the output.
Second-order effects
Copilot product teams will face a higher bar for any in-workflow recommendation or cross-promotion, particularly in developer surfaces where unsolicited text can be mistaken for generated code guidance.
The episode adds to scrutiny of Copilot’s commercial model as GitHub moves toward token-based usage billing, making transparency about what users receive for paid usage more consequential.
Third-order effects
If developers continue to reject promotional or opaque behavior in coding agents, differentiation will increasingly depend on predictable controls, provenance and workflow neutrality rather than feature breadth alone.
The broader pressure is toward explicit, configurable AI-assistant policies: vendors may need to separate assistance, monetization and data use more visibly to preserve developer trust.
The trend: Developer AI is shifting from a feature race toward a governance-and-trust contest, as assistants become embedded in sensitive production workflows.
@geerlingguy We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the …
Here's the official line from GitHub on the ads in PRs story - I find this explanation credible personally, it looks to me like it was a poorly considered product tips feature that got out of hand
@WindowsCentral This was a mistake on our side - there were no ad arrangements with any company. What happened is we'd previously included product tips including one that mentioned Raycast in Copilot PR's. These tips were originally meant to only show up in PRs created by Copilot…
Everyone involved with any part of Microsoft's AI strategy needs to be kept away from the keyboard for the next 3 years - they are bad at it almost universally
Microsoft / GitHub injecting ads into CoPilot generated PRs: welcome to the future! https://notes.zachmanson.com/ ... (yes, this was a confirmed “feature” from someone on the CoPilot team; apparently they are disabling it after backlash)
The bigger the hype cycle, the faster the enshittification. Is this the extreme velocity that the “AI” techbros have been talking about? www.neowin.net/news/microso...
People hate on AI, but sometimes AI is just faster at things. — Here we see how much faster AI is at enshitification! — notes.zachmanson.com/copilot- edit... [image]
GitHub Copilot Was Secretly Injecting Ads Into Developers' Pull Requests Using A Hidden HTML Tag, And It Happened Over 11,000 Times Before Anyone Noticed 🤖