I work at MSFT. I can understand the incentives behind this change. Although I am not sure how different GitHub culture is from MSFT.
I am sure they are closely tracking this metric of Copilot authored PRs so that everyone down from Nadella to the dev and PM for this can use it to hype up GH Copilot. It’s also a simple and clean metric that goes well in your Connects (performance discussion), you could say the feature I worked on led to xx million copilot authored PRs and there is now an AI usage mandate and you need to mention how you used AI to do something more efficiently blah blah. It’s good old promotion theatre. I don’t think its unique to MSFT though and is probably common across Big Tech.
There are alternative ways to gather telemetry data about your usage, then literally polluting the commit message / PR description of the author. Why even consider doing that in the first place?
There ought to be decent number of people within Microsoft who have "Copilot usage" as a KPI. I don't think this was gamesmanship on their part (no sarcasm, I truly do not suspect malice), but I'm sure if it could have slipped in without backlash, they would have enjoyed seeing their line go up.
Sorry, I don't see another plausible motive than KPIs must go up. The change came from a product manager and was also reviewed and approved by one or two apparently senior developers. They may have tried to slip it in accidentally on purpose.
IMO (and I am biased because I have written about this before in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47164481) but I believe it's to make sure they're legally covering their users, and making sure users of AI tools do at least have some attribution for AI-derived contributions
That doesn’t quite work for cases where you’re either the primary author of a commit (asking the model for some touch ups) or when you heavily edit model output. Easier to just say “this is who’s driving the AI” and keep it to your username.
I'm not sure that anyone wants the scarlet letter of an AI coauthor on their code just because they used something simple like next edit suggestions or AI autocomplete. It seems like the "all" setting basically only exists for people that haven't figured out how to change it to something else yet.
(Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)
Yeah. I wasn’t angry about this a couple days ago, but I am now.
So the thing that’s on by default and makes autocomplete worse (plain intelligence never changed my s.x = 0 to s.xVInputRadiusDetectionThreshold = 0 if I happened to take my eyes off the screen for a moment) is now stealing credit for my work?
Agree. I'm more reliant on having a keyboard than on having copilot make tab suggestions and I wouldn't like my PRs to include a tag: "Keystrokes courtesy of: Keychron K3 Max".
Are they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.
Seems pretty clear, Claude and Codex were getting a lot of free publicity by instructing their models to do the same and MS wanted similar results. However, a bug caused this to be applied to all commits instead of all Copilot-influenced commits.
I recall there was some understanding that it had a legitimate use as well as the obvious marketing, which was to advise the reader that the message may be unexpectedly concise or contain errors because it was sent from a cell phone, something less common before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry phones did this too for the same reasons.
You misunderstand the purpose of "Sent from my iPhone" - it was a status symbol, it showed that the sender was part of the superior iPhone owning elite. It was trivial to remove, but most didnt "oh, I am too busy too remove it, I guess I'll just leave it and let everybody know I can afford an iPhone".
You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.
I always thought this was an implicit request to forgive obvious typos and autocorrect mistakes. Sent from a mobile device (iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc.) with a tiny keyboard and in a setting in which proofreading may not be as rigorous as normal.
“Sent from my iPhone” is a default signature, but you can change the message under Settings -> Apps -> Mail -> Signature (at the bottom of the options page)
As I've written elsewhere in the thread, having worked at a large Enterprise in collaboration with Legal, if there isn't tracking of what AI contributions you have, it's harder to be protected legally by ie Microsoft's indemnity clause if you're sued
It's only one sliver of the problem here, but -- do you know how often I update my code editor? Like once every five or ten years, to the version that was released a year or two ago.
I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.
VSCode updates itself what feels like daily so everyone is on the bleeding edge. There are upsides and downsides to that but it doesn’t feel like a trade-off many have made purposefully.
It's not even default to ON, it's default to ALL (or at least to a lot), even non co-pilot commits, that's what made people made. If it was at least correct maybe it would have gone unnoticed.
Honestly extremely pathetic by a trillion dollar corporation that has a massive, undemocratic, say in how technology is developed in this country.
Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.
Yeah break up all the big companies so Chinese state sponsored behemoths can take over everything. This isn’t the 90s where Americans only competed with other Americans.
China is competing so well because it has a central bureaucracy that issues 5 year plans and issues money to get them done. Do you think America should do that too, or do you think America and China are different countries with different values?
Let’s not forget how much US tech came from government programs like ARPA/DARPA. It isn’t exactly a decentralized bureaucracy. Just hasn’t been hitting as well recently.
"America is just as bad as China" is not cute or clever; it's trite and objectively wrong. There really is no intellectually honest argument to the contrary. For starters we don't get arrested for saying "Kent State Massacre" - can't say as much for "Tiananmen Square" in China. No matter how atrocious our government may be at times, it doesn't hold a candle to them.
> We did catch it internally in testing [1]
Today:
> bug in the code that was not found in testing.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193