alt.hn

5/2/2026 at 7:57:26 PM

VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226

by indrora

5/3/2026 at 12:06:42 AM

I am the person who approved this PR and would like to acknowledge and apologize for the mistake of turning this feature on by default without sufficient upfront validation.

There was no ill intent by evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code. As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.

Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI. I'll work on fixing those and meanwhile revert default to off in 1.119 update.

I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions - please feel free to reach me directly (my alias @microsoft.com) or open an issue on GitHub. Happy to answer anything here as well.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 1:15:21 AM

I think the constructive criticism is best directed at whatever process you are following. That process allowed a very visible user facing change in a widely used piece of software. How did this change make it to production without some process catching the impact of this change? Was there really no internal discussion from a code review at least? This seems hard for me to believe. I expect more from Microsoft.

by somebehemoth

5/3/2026 at 4:43:27 AM

> Was there really no internal discussion from a code review at least? This seems hard for me to believe.

The outlined story feels unfortunately very believable to me.

Teams need to push out the most number of features, and nobody stops even for a second to think about how a feature might affect other flows or other users not in the feature request.

It might have been quickly reviewed to check if the code does what it needs to do (add the coauthor note).

Do you think reviewers will think about unwanted effects, when they need get back to feeding their own poorly thought out and underspec’d features to their LLMs?

by serial_dev

5/3/2026 at 6:38:00 PM

> Was there really no internal discussion from a code review at least? This seems hard for me to believe.

>The outlined story feels unfortunately very believable to me.

100% agree here - we seem to forget that most developers hate code reviews. I actually laughed out loud at the use of the word "discussion," it's so rare people want to get together and talk about changes. By the time the PR is up anything that stands in the way of merging and shipping is seen as a nuisance.

To my mind this whole debacle is not really the individuals fault or even the team's fault but the economic pressures that drive people into situations like this.

by _doctor_love

5/3/2026 at 7:03:47 AM

Fair point. We did catch it internally in testing (as we use VS Code for all our work, so some folks did stumble on it), but I think we underestimated the impact and should do a better job at that.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 10:32:05 AM

This is honestly the most concerning part of all of this. You're saying you knew that this exact bug was present up front and still decided to release it?

This basically invalidates the entire premise that it was an innocent mistake. It's impossible for me to believe that you actually thought that people wouldn't care about 100% of their commits being attributed to Copilot even when it was never used. Either you're misconstruing what you caught with the testing beforehand or your entire development process is tainted, because there's no way that a non-evil corporation would see this default behavior and think that people would be fine with it. It seems far more likely you just thought you could get away with it.

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 11:27:03 AM

Agreed, this approach feels like folks at Microsoft still feel they have enough karma to burn. It's way past that.

by sinpif

5/3/2026 at 11:32:09 AM

I think there is a "ship fast" component here that should be adjusted. Product Management introduced weekly "stable" releases in March, no matter the content.

by lppedd

5/3/2026 at 6:13:53 PM

don't call it a bug, they were intentionally aggressively pushing marketing copy into people's commits.

this was malice or greed

by make3

5/4/2026 at 6:49:51 PM

I think so too, but my point is that even according to their own words about what happened, the best possible interpretation is that they didn't mean to do it but knowingly let it happen. I agree that a worse version is more likely, but it's pretty damning when even the ceiling for what they can plausibly claim is "we intentionally didn't bother stopping it once it happened accidentally".

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 10:54:14 AM

Seems that they released it only in some internal / alpha version.

by spixy

5/3/2026 at 9:46:49 AM

Thank you. My personal opinion is the idea of weekly releases should be discarded. It's too easy to release broken stuff in non-insiders updates.

I think many people agree here.

by lppedd

5/3/2026 at 8:12:39 PM

A generous read of this comment might be that you did catch it internally in testing AFTER it shipped but shrugged it off as something you'd patch in the next release in a week or two. Is that what you meant here?

Or that it was caught but didn't surface fully before release?

A helpful governance policy here might be that anything that mutates user content without opt-in consent requires a distinct sign-off or a double sign-off. If the goal is to prevent this from happening in future.

by anbende

5/3/2026 at 8:05:51 PM

You say in another comment this slipped through testing. Can you elaborate on exactly what was caught in internal testing?

by geekone

5/4/2026 at 11:40:15 PM

I don't really understand this. There was a known bug and it was shipped anyway? I must be misunderstanding

by xenago

5/3/2026 at 9:30:11 AM

It got to production because they wanted it.

> This seems hard for me to believe. I expect more from Microsoft.

Those are some baseless expectations given the entire company's history

by PunchyHamster

5/3/2026 at 3:37:53 PM

Expecting more from Microsoft is the new showing-my-age: of being born in this century.

by noisy_boy

5/3/2026 at 11:59:34 PM

I saw a lot of "they made a game I like (Halo), therefore they must not be that bad" from the gaming cloud that only experienced the console side of it

by PunchyHamster

5/3/2026 at 1:45:15 PM

Also, who/what group is pushing for this change internally and what is the opinion of the team implementing it? What is the road map and vision for AI in VSCode?

by marricks

5/4/2026 at 12:16:44 AM

[dead]

by sorry_outta_gas

5/3/2026 at 1:36:36 AM

I think there’s a few of us who appreciate you being up front. I’d question the intent and why it was a mistake, especially when the commit[0] message reverting said functionality states “widespread criticism” citing this very HN article makes it look seemingly like the revert is due to negative PR opposed to a mistake.

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313725/commits/1e70...

by jamesbfb

5/3/2026 at 1:52:10 AM

Author of that PR doesn't seem to be a Microsoft employee. Keep in mind that anyone on GitHub can create PRs against VSCode.

by l2dy

5/3/2026 at 2:18:35 AM

Author is absolutely from Microsoft

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226

https://github.com/cwebster-99

by beardbandit

5/3/2026 at 2:44:13 AM

The linked revert PR is not from Microsoft (and also isn't merged)

by kllrnohj

5/3/2026 at 4:31:59 PM

It is merged

by politelemon

5/3/2026 at 7:00:52 PM

dmitriv recreated in a separate PR and merged that. The linked revert PR by a user was closed.

by PinkSheep

5/3/2026 at 7:20:07 AM

Yep - Says he's got a Microsoft.com email address:

> "feel free to reach me directly (my alias @microsoft.com) or"

by ncr100

5/3/2026 at 2:07:58 AM

Even if that would be so, the person who approved it certainly is.

by lightdot

5/3/2026 at 7:05:09 AM

I am reverting it because there are bug in the feature and it obviously does not work as expected. Any feedback is important, HN or not.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 7:46:21 PM

So, you're reverting because of "bugs", not because you had massive backfire? Do you understand that no one wants this, right?

by liendolucas

5/3/2026 at 6:42:55 AM

My issue with this: if my intention is to never have these "co authored by <tool>" trailers in my commits, this is a sudden breaking change. What's worse, it is not immediately visible to the user. Now I could look like I use a not-company-approved AI. That's absolutely unacceptable, this could cost people their jobs. The "bug" (or "metrics boosting feature", as PMs call it?) that it claims all commits including ones never touched by Copilot are just icing on cake.

by PufPufPuf

5/3/2026 at 2:08:46 AM

Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable. Even if this feature worked correctly, it obviously doesn’t, this should at minimum be a prompt after upgrade to let the user confirm that this is what they want. But honestly should be opt in for those that want it.

To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.

This kind of thing being released speaks to a greater disfunction over there. Not a good look at all and I am not a Microsoft or AI hater. But my commit messages are not where you move fast and break things

by alemanek

5/3/2026 at 2:37:41 AM

Well, the good news is commit messages are some of the most visible thing, and there are no silent modifications that are really possible.

The bad news is - where else have this happened in VS Code?

- A happy user of (n)vim

by Aperocky

5/3/2026 at 2:19:07 PM

> Well, the good news is commit messages are some of the most visible thing, and there are no silent modifications that are really possible.

The problem is that it's only visible after committing, it doesn't seem to show in the integrated git view when you prepare the commit.

by echoangle

5/3/2026 at 6:56:18 AM

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.

I noticed that as soon as you make a bug report/feature request on VSCode's repo, you instantly get someone's OpenClaw agent with an automated pull request that sometimes wants to change defaults in the main codebase

Looks like AI is really trigger-happy with that, with zero understanding or care that there's thousands of users affected and it's not just one individual's settings.json

Also, the hallucinated PR does not necessarily address the original issue whatsoever, just like this PR. It should have functionality to detect AI-authored code, but whoever made the PR skipped actually doing the hard work and just changed a default to always on, exactly the kind of misunderstanding you see with OpenClaw shotgun PRs

by Aerolfos

5/3/2026 at 8:04:36 AM

And then they apparently posted an alibi "I'm sorry" here. Or maybe it is genuine, but the choice is between incompetence and fake "I'm sorry". Where is QA?

by zelphirkalt

5/3/2026 at 8:20:33 AM

As far as I know VSCode doesn't really have QA. I'm not sure it even has tests, which makes it very surprising that it works as well as it does!

by IshKebab

5/3/2026 at 9:55:12 AM

Because it is dogfood?

(Meaning the devs use it themself, that is great incentive to fix things)

by lukan

5/3/2026 at 7:05:01 AM

> To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.

This is one of the problems, but it is not only one. To be better, should be:

1. It should be visible in the UI for entering the commit message, to make it clear what it is doing.

2. It should not add such a thing if the Copilot is disabled. (It is mentioned by dmitriv and would hopefully be fixed soon enough)

I do not use Copilot nor any other LLMs nor VS Code, but if the problems are corrected then I think the feature would probably be reasonable.

by zzo38computer

5/3/2026 at 7:39:27 AM

Agreed on both points. Having it shown before going into the commit would let the developer decide whether they want it. #2 is fixed in my PR.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 9:01:17 AM

Thank you for being upfront and engaging with us on this. This was a breach of trust, but your engagement here is commendable.

by adastra22

5/4/2026 at 2:58:08 AM

You're giving a lot of credit to a one day old anonymous account.

by b40d-48b2-979e

5/4/2026 at 6:30:39 AM

I have no reason to assume this is not Dmitriy Vasyura.

by adastra22

5/3/2026 at 9:41:36 AM

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable

How else is a poor programmer gonna hit their KPIs and get that promo?

by imron

5/3/2026 at 4:06:28 AM

"unforgivable" is a little melodramatic

by someguynamedq

5/3/2026 at 7:52:09 PM

No, it's fine. I really hope that more people will switch to something else, like Neovim, Emacs, or any other open-source editor where such unacceptable situations are practically impossible. I hope more people will start to value their privacy and right to choose, and find the courage to say gtfo and switch to something else. Because this is unforgivable.

by allarm

5/3/2026 at 8:19:53 AM

please no more popups on vscode, im begging you

by lucas_t_a

5/3/2026 at 4:39:13 PM

It really is a problem, across Microsoft as a whole. I had to ditch VS after the constant popups finally pissed me off enough.

by Pay08

5/3/2026 at 2:31:02 AM

[flagged]

by dakolli

5/3/2026 at 8:41:46 AM

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.

What does that even mean? The git log exists. Do you mean they should shove the entire git log in the face of every user on every update?

Obviously this change was a massive fuckup, but that sentence makes absolutely no sense.

by boxed

5/3/2026 at 2:11:06 PM

It just means that when changing a global default with such impact the user should be prompted with an option to opt out of the new behavior. Something like “AI assisted changes will now have ‘coauthored by Copilot’ added to the commit message”. If the user clicks “no thanks” it changes their local setting to “off” to opt them out of this new global default.

by alemanek

5/3/2026 at 3:06:00 AM

Don't you understand that the default shouldn't be changed at all in this case? It improves nothing and affects every single user. If an org/project wants this behavior then it can enforce this flag for its contributions. The only valid reason for this change is someone's performance somewhere in Microsoft is dependent on VS Copilot usage metric.

by anvuong

5/3/2026 at 7:44:37 AM

Good feedback, there needs to be a more explicit opt-in into this for teams that want it. FWIW nobody's performance here will improve from having this metric :-)

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 7:54:41 PM

> FWIW nobody's performance here will improve from having this metric

It's even more frightening if so. Meaning you really thought it's something users wanted.

by allarm

5/3/2026 at 2:22:41 AM

Interesting case:

- a project manager vibe-coded the change without thinking it through at all

- the PR was reviewed by an LLM

- an actual engineer gave LGTM without really reviewing the changes, trusting the LLM

Did I get this right?

by kgeist

5/3/2026 at 4:25:13 AM

>a project manager vibe-coded the change without thinking it through at all

The PMs vibe-coding and having no idea what they're doing isn't even the main issue (although it is pretty bad).

The main issue is: how are the actual engineers supposed to "review" the slop? They probably report to the same PM or are at below in the org chart and might be evaluated by them. Not just at MS, but any company.

Such a conflict of interest would be detrimental to quality anywhere. You wouldn't build a bridge like this, nor should you software.

by throwaway277432

5/3/2026 at 10:14:32 AM

The revert commit appears to have also been done by copilot

by duskdozer

5/3/2026 at 4:42:18 AM

You can't make this shit up.

by strix_varius

5/3/2026 at 3:24:22 AM

The LLM actually points out the problem tho

by teg4n_

5/3/2026 at 3:39:39 AM

Maybe the engineer's LLM agent's summary of the GitHub LLM bot's review omitted that warning.

by isityettime

5/3/2026 at 7:03:55 AM

Maybe the GitHub comments didn’t properly load due to the weekly partial outage.

by herrherrmann

5/3/2026 at 1:41:39 AM

Why does the commit editor hide the coauthored message? Why not pre-populate the text field and users take or leave it when committing?

by schwede

5/3/2026 at 9:27:48 AM

I think this is a good point - perhaps there should be some commit-time UI which would let the user make the choice. Thanks for the suggestion!

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 2:53:38 AM

Co-Authored-By is normally a trailer, and trailers aren’t part of the commit message. It’s likely the commit editor isn’t set up to show trailers. They’re not exactly obscure, but it does seem that they’re relatively unknown.

by jdlshore

5/3/2026 at 4:16:13 AM

What do you mean they aren’t part of the commit message? Trailers like (signed off by) are absolutely part of the message. Tools can choose to treat them as special metadata, but they’re part of the commit.

The docs for the function to interpret trailers even says this explicitly: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers

> Add or parse structured information in commit messages

by mplanchard

5/3/2026 at 4:54:52 AM

I mean that they’re not necessarily part of the --message parameter to `git commit`, but instead part of the --trailer parameter. I don’t know how VSCode is programmed, but it seems plausible that trailers are handled separately from the message parameter.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit

by jdlshore

5/3/2026 at 10:20:25 AM

We're talking about Git here. The question is not "how VSCode is programmed", the question is "does Git have a special field for commit trailers". The answer is no. Git stores the trailer as part of the commit message.

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 2:55:02 PM

If you look at the comment I’m responding to, it is in fact about how VSCode is programmed; specifically, a possible reason why the Co-Authored-By trailer doesn’t show up in VSCode’s commit message box.

by jdlshore

5/6/2026 at 5:20:59 AM

It seems like it would be most reasonable to consider porcelain vs. plumbing command details in deciding if something is logically distinct to Git. git-commit has --message and --trailer options, git-commit-tree has a --message option. I take that as trailer is a convenience option to provide a consistent way to append those details to the commit message. But that doesn't mean it's not part of the commit message, nor that the user shouldn't see it while reviewing the commit message.

by opello

5/3/2026 at 12:58:56 AM

I appreciate you acknowledging that this was a mistake, but as you surely know from your own experience with other people’s mistakes, some mistakes are so egregious that they cast doubt on the intentions of the people involved even if they are corrected later.

To me, “let’s add false attribution to every commit by default without informing the user” falls squarely into that category. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an environment where something like that wouldn’t have been red-flagged in three seconds by anyone who took even a casual glance. I’d honestly be embarrassed if such a proposal even made it into a public pull request for my organization, nevermind that pull request getting merged.

by p-e-w

5/3/2026 at 6:44:17 AM

If what you described would make it to our PR queue, it would definitely not pass the gates.

The idea was to track AI-only changes and add the trailer when such changes were detected AND the setting was enabled. Obviously, we didn't want to attribute all changes to AI. There is a bug in change detection (which slipped through testing), which led to even non-AI changes being tracked. And thus we have this problem.

The PR linked here wasn't even implementing the feature, it was changing the default for the setting.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 9:39:19 AM

> (which slipped through testing)

In another comment you say you caught it in testing and didn't think it needed fixing, which is it?

by detaro

5/4/2026 at 5:45:35 AM

>If what you described would make it to our PR queue, it would definitely not pass the gates

It just did though. Did you approve the PR without actually looking at the code?

by fastasucan

5/3/2026 at 6:32:14 AM

I just wanted to say, while I think this feature was a bad idea, I sincerely applaud your willingness to post here, knowing you'll get roasted. Seriously brave and commendable.

by freedomben

5/3/2026 at 7:18:11 AM

They pretended to be fronting up but didn’t respond to anything after that. Doesn’t seem very commendable to me.

by galonk

5/3/2026 at 8:19:56 AM

Other people aren’t your slaves. You don’t get to demand they respond immediately, and this Reddit-like mindset needs to die. HN is a place where we often can actually get devs from companies responding directly and listening to feedback, and this hostility is looked at by all the other devs from those similar companies and remembered when it’ll be their turn.

Stop making HN a worse place for everyone by being unnecessarily hostile. (and this comment is only mildly directed at you but rather at a bunch of people in this thread)

by scrollaway

5/4/2026 at 2:41:27 AM

They said three times "ask me anything" and then didn't respond to a single question. Stop making HN wose by comparing someone dodging accountability to slavery.

by galonk

5/3/2026 at 9:24:46 AM

Someone made a mistake, owned up to it and fixed it. No one is entitled to more than that for a free software.

Anyone with a bit of software experience knows it’s easy to miss things when you are doing your own tasks + context switching + giving reviews. We should exercise kindness and empathy instead of projecting evil intentions.

by _waqas_ali_

5/3/2026 at 10:18:20 AM

> Someone made a mistake, owned up to it and fixed it. No one is entitled to more than that for a free software.

Funny how these "mistakes" only seem to happen in ways that align with the agenda of the supposedly non-evil corporation.

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 12:14:36 PM

Not sure about the other “mistakes” but this one is way too stupid to be evil :) Hanlon’s razor applies pretty well here.

Pretty sure no one thought “let’s add a lie to every commit and hopefully no one minds. Free Marketing yay!” at Microsoft.

by _waqas_ali_

5/3/2026 at 2:44:13 PM

Even if I accepted the premise that this is too stupid to be evil, that doesn't change the fact that this would be extremely easy to test for. The fact that they considered it important enough to get this feature implemented without proper testing says plenty about their incentives.

They might not have intentionally done this (although it's honestly not clear), but they definitely didn't care enough to prevent it because it wouldn't have been hard at all. That's my point here; which bugs slip through and which don't implicitly conveys what their priorities are. I don't think it's particularly hard to infer what story this bug tells.

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 2:03:56 PM

IDK, I heard way stupider and less ethical ideas at work.

by FeistySkink

5/3/2026 at 7:36:13 AM

That's a good point, let's see if they come back and respond. It is the middle of the night in the US so they may be sleeping

by freedomben

5/3/2026 at 7:41:53 AM

It is the middle of the night and I am responding. Anything specific you'd like me to respond to?

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 8:51:26 AM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47992781

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47992568

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47992475

by jdenning

5/3/2026 at 9:26:49 AM

First comment does not sound constructive - are you interested in my opinion on (n)vim?

I am not a legal, so can't comment on legal things. However, I have already responded elsewhere here that this feature has nothing to do with licensing or ownership and was added for those that want the attribution. I understand the desire to see anything Microsoft as bad and evil, but we are really just trying to make a better experience.

I'll respond to the third one, thanks!

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 1:23:37 PM

Perhaps next time you should consult with legal before asserting co-authorship on end users’ code. The appended comment was not “edited with VS code” or “sent from VS code”, it was “co-authored by Copilot”. You do understand that there are legal implications to claims of authorship, right?

by jdenning

5/3/2026 at 7:06:58 PM

To be honest, this question should be directed at the person who made the change/commit:

> cwebster-99 / Courtney Webster / Product Manager at @microsoft working on VS Code and GitHub Copilot!

>> No description provided.

by PinkSheep

5/3/2026 at 11:20:31 AM

It was pretty obvious from your first comment that you were going to get creative with the definition of "constructive".

> are you interested in my opinion on (n)vim?

The first comment is three short lines. One of them is the extremely reasonable and relevant question of where else this has happened in VSCode.

And you think that the commenter is wondering about your opinion on (n)vim? That is what you think they are interested in?

Could you just, like, ignore the signature if it is distracting you from the only other line that has a question in it?

by albedoa

5/3/2026 at 1:17:22 PM

Comments like this are why developers don’t engage directly. The first link is “just asking questions” and implying that the project is rotten. He’s not being “creative” he’s just not engaging in bait.

by maccard

5/3/2026 at 4:40:41 PM

They’ve done a commendable job responding. Please show some respect when people put themselves in vulnerable situations, otherwise the whole “devs respond on HN” thing will cease to happen.

by HDThoreaun

5/3/2026 at 9:30:25 AM

I noticed you only respond to comments that are positive (or neutral). The majority (and the most insightful) comments here are negative, but you seem to ignore them.

by 400thecat

5/3/2026 at 8:04:15 AM

their comments are dead, probably related to it being a new account

by gizzlon

5/3/2026 at 9:28:51 AM

I really did create a new account to respond :)

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 11:46:39 AM

Why are you taking the fall and not the PM who authored the change (and submitted a PR with an uninformative title and no comment) and, I'm assuming, plays a role in managing the project?

by snet0

5/3/2026 at 4:00:45 AM

Just for any future mea culpa, I'd recommend not hedging with comments like this one:

> As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.

It's really doubtful they have the same behavior people are complaining about here: namely including the authored by Copilot statement when it wasn't used (or even enabled).

by nsagent

5/3/2026 at 4:26:41 AM

Anthropic does by default. I had to put “no co-authored by lines in commits, ever” into my global settings.

That’s pretty close to “included when it wasn’t used (or even enabled)” since it’s opt-in by default and you have to explicitly say no. It’s not even clear where to turn it off, I just rely on the AI to figure out not to do it.

by sillysaurusx

5/3/2026 at 8:07:15 AM

Maybe I misunderstand you, how is Claude doing commits where you don't use Claude?

That is a very different case to VS Code which is something you can in fact use without Copilot.

by jstanley

5/3/2026 at 10:00:41 AM

That is not what dmitriv claimed. He said this was a bug, the behavior should have been to add it only when AI was involved, which indeed, is what claude does by default.

(Both is not fine with me)

by lukan

5/3/2026 at 3:47:28 AM

> I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions

Here's one:

I think a senior sysadmin needs to sit you down in their office and have a very serious talk with you about the responsibility that comes with writing code other people run. I am serious. We used to have these talks with everyone who got sudo access. You shouldn't be shipping code if you don't understand the trust that is required of people in your position.

This isn't just about this "feature" being active when AI features are disabled, the way you mis-implemented this has resulted in it modifying the commit message with the user even seeing it! That is malicious behavior, not an innocent little feature "to make life easier".

I've fully switched off of VS Code to Kate now, which is faster and better behaved in most cases anyway. Bye.

by solid_fuel

5/3/2026 at 4:19:27 AM

To be fair, looks like a PM vibe coded it and this person “just” gave it an approval with no comments after an LLM review.

by mplanchard

5/3/2026 at 4:43:45 AM

To be fair, that makes it worse for MS, not better.

This should not be vibe-coded by someone who has absolutely no idea about any of these things.

by throwaway277432

5/3/2026 at 12:20:50 PM

Oh yeah sorry, I was being sarcastic. I think it’s hilariously bad, but I also avoid MS products like the plague as a rule.

by mplanchard

5/3/2026 at 3:51:14 AM

He makes more money than you and you’re responding to his ai chatbot

Seethe

by ATMLOTTOBEER

5/3/2026 at 8:39:26 PM

There’s more to life than money, child.

by solid_fuel

5/3/2026 at 8:40:30 AM

What is the use-case where you expect users would be happy that you modify their commit messages with MS marketing? Do you think it would be ok to edit every commit to append “written with VS Code”?

by jdenning

5/3/2026 at 9:31:33 AM

MS would absolutely do that if they could get away with. Hell, you'd get azure promo code with it

by PunchyHamster

5/3/2026 at 2:57:46 AM

thank you for doing this, it gave me the push I needed to finally switch to zed. vscode has really been going downhill for a while now. it's sad to watch, it used to be a really nice editor

by jbxntuehineoh

5/3/2026 at 8:10:24 AM

- A qualified sorry for one particular aspect of this

- It wasn't our intention

- Our users asked for it [you'll have to take our word for it]

- Everyone else is doing it anyway

- Statement that I am reasonable and will be co-operative with the community but with conditions

That's a bingo!

by gib444

5/3/2026 at 1:59:49 AM

> a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code

Literally who?

by nhinck2

5/3/2026 at 3:26:34 AM

I could easily see companies, especially enterprise-level companies, expect code that was generated with AI to have some level of ownership attributed to that AI. Whether a simple "Co-Authored-by Copilot" byline on the commit is the right way to do that is another question though.

by JoRyGu

5/3/2026 at 7:46:19 AM

Correct, this was the ask.

by dmitriv

5/4/2026 at 2:24:13 PM

And thank you for this. In my professional setting, this is a very valuable addition -- provided it works correctly, of course ;-).

Now if we could also have comments inside the code ("BEGIN/END snippet by Copilot"), that would also be great!

by zvr

5/3/2026 at 3:17:41 AM

No one, which is why he refuses to reply further to any of these inquiries.

by IAmGraydon

5/3/2026 at 7:46:39 AM

I don't refuse - what would you like to ask?

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 8:08:53 AM

they do, at least to some degree, but their comments are dead. You'll see them if you turn on show-dead somewhere

by gizzlon

5/3/2026 at 6:28:02 AM

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation

I simply do not believe you

by wren6991

5/3/2026 at 8:10:30 AM

It’s true. There was no ill intent, just a system of incentives that not only permitted but encouraged it.

by nicbou

5/3/2026 at 7:48:21 AM

That's ok :-)

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 8:07:43 AM

> There was no ill intent

Only callous disregard for your users

> many similar tools do this as well

But since we have normalised that, it’s okay?

by nicbou

5/3/2026 at 2:00:32 AM

Thanks for facing this head-on here; mistakes happen.

I think the default to on should also be reconsidered regardless. The assessment (co-authored by AI) may be valid but the assumption the user wants that advertising is exactly that, an assumption, and a dubious one at that.

by mellosouls

5/3/2026 at 1:58:40 AM

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code.

What metric did Microsoft use to assess that VS Code users "expect" their commits to have unsolicited messages added to them?

> Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI.

Did you discuss adding these messages with your legal department?

What is Microsoft's position on adding such authorship statements to the code Microsoft did not author?

Or is Microsoft stating that using LLM assistants makes Microsoft a co-author of the code?

Does Microsoft have copyright claims on the code if LLM assistants are used at any time during its creation?

by lightdot

5/3/2026 at 8:46:02 AM

I would also really like to see answers to these questions. This change explicitly claims that MS co-authored the commit.

by jdenning

5/3/2026 at 4:55:53 AM

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code. As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.

Then make it an extension, not a IDE-behaviour thing. Is that so complicated, so difficult?

by captainepoch

5/3/2026 at 7:47:29 AM

It would be tricky, yes, since it depends on core editor functionality which is not exposed through the API.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 10:23:58 AM

So why did this feature get rushed out without proper testing? Are you claiming that not having this happen automatically for the commits where Copilot actually co-authored them is so urgent that it was necessary?

I'd argue that this was extremely non-urgent and the fact that this got rushed so sloppily is a giant red flag about the priorities of you and your team. You asked about constructive criticism, and yet you're also acting like this is a one-off innocent mistake by only addressing what you've done to roll this back for now and address the immediate issue. I don't buy the premise that we could trust that this was a mistake made in good faith when it's something that you clearly should have known people would be so upset about if you got it wrong.

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 9:13:50 AM

Considering the size (and significance) of the VSCode user base, it feels like someone should be in charge of ensuring that default behavior doesn't change without good reason.

Does anyone (or any team) have ownership of the extensions/git/package.json file?

by DavidVoid

5/3/2026 at 8:33:30 AM

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code.

Can you expand on this? Who "expects" their code editor to lie about using Copilot?

by macic

5/3/2026 at 8:43:06 AM

The supposedly expected functionality is very obviously that it marks copilot co-authored code as copilot co-authored, not the bug that is being reverted.

by yreg

5/3/2026 at 9:29:50 AM

Correct.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 6:15:51 PM

> a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code

This isn't enough. What was the _full train of thought_ for this? Why would it be added when AI isn't used?

by kevinmgranger

5/5/2026 at 1:57:53 AM

FYI - we have posted update on the subject with more details, links and analysis here: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/314311

Hopefully this answers some more of the questions raised here. It also incorporates a lot of feedback from this thread with respect to next steps (thank you!).

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 6:51:25 PM

Under which circumstances can you ever approve something like this?

This goes beyond incompetence. Either you do not understand what important information a commit holds or what seems way more plausible to me is that Microsoft simply decided to try this out and see how people would react.

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation...

I will ever in my life buy that from Microsoft.

by liendolucas

5/3/2026 at 2:27:55 AM

Have it as an add-on said customers can add. Opt-in, not opt-out. No AI without consent.

by teunispeters

5/3/2026 at 8:31:14 AM

Changing a global default this way is hugely disrespectful to users.

As a result I’ll be uninstalling vscode from all my machines, I’m tired of disabling things in vscode I didn’t ask for especially in regards to AI.

There are open source tools that clearly respect users more and have a track record of not doing these kinds of stupid things.

Be better.

by noir_lord

5/3/2026 at 10:09:45 PM

Whether or not the intent is good, the optics are extremely bad.

I assume you are keenly aware that Windows, Office, and by extension, all of MS's customer facing products are not exactly regarded particularly well. Windows 11 specifically is a laughing stock today, even among folks who don't necessarily know computers, and a lot of that resentment is driven by 2 things:

• Pushing AI everywhere when no one asked for it. • Not reading the room and adding junk features that no one wants.

This change is both of those, again, wrapped up in another package. The timing of this is extremely bad for VS Code as a project as it looks an awful lot like, 'Microsoft is just shoving my AI junk into my stuff and failing to work on the features we actually want'.

I'm not taking a side on this either way as I will jam a fork into my eye before I use VS Code over VS proper and have no stake in this, but I'm just saying that the powers that be that are approving these kinds of changes are ~continuing~ to fail to read the room.

I'll add as someone who may be forced to consider VS Code in the future (Depending on if Windows unfucks itself before something critical breaks for me on W10), I would read something like that and I think rightly assume bad intent. I know VS Code and VS and Office and Windows are not the same team, but again, MS as a whole has a very serious optics problems and my read of this on the surface level is: "Oh, they tried to sneak in more AI junk, and when called out on it, they pushed it to the back, probably to make it a default again in some future update that they can hide it in". It just looks very, very bad at a time when no MS products have negative social capital to spend on this kind of stuff.

by Kadecgos

5/3/2026 at 1:12:55 PM

I appreciate your willingness to come and try and salvage this situation. What I don't understand is why are you the one doing this here and on GH, during the weekend, and not the PM who created the original PR? Surely they have some input.

And another thing is, why was there absolutely no pushback from your part on any of the issues with the original PR, and why it was merged within hours in that state?

by FeistySkink

5/3/2026 at 7:46:51 PM

Respectfully -

You are working for one of the largest companies on the planet. You push code that gets used by millions of people.

How on earth are you not thoroughly testing your changes??? How can something like this slip into a real build? Like, this is egregious.

I work somewhere that makes software for a lot of users (although not as many as Microsoft!). We also need to ship quickly. But we work on a 45-day cycle, with 15 of those days being dedicated to ensuring we didn't add any awful bugs (and fixing them ASAP before it goes to users - or reverting the change until it is ready).

I would expect Microsoft to have AT LEAST that amount of care. We can't trust that you are shipping software that even works anymore!

What other changes are going in that are broken in more subtle ways? It used to be that VS Code was rock solid, and any issues were likely third-party extensions - but now it's a crapshoot, and I can't be sure if crashes etc. are the fault of extensions or Microsoft themselves!

The VS Code team needs to use this mistake as motivation to lead the charge on making a quality editor. Not an editor that gets half-baked, untested changes pushed weekly. An editor that is dogfooded and where a mistake like this going to prod is unacceptable.

Because if you don't, people won't trust your editor anymore. Just like people have stopped trusting your OS, and now users are fleeing it in such numbers that the Windows team has recognized they have a problem and are changing course.

That WILL happen to VS Code and GitHub soon unless you actually start owning mistakes internally and fixing them before users find them.

by EnglishMobster

5/3/2026 at 10:12:35 AM

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code. As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.

Please elaborate on what "similar tools" claim that commits are co-authored by AI when the AI features are all turned off. You're trying to defend the theoretically correct version of this that you didn't make, not the actual version you did make.

> I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions

It's hard to take this seriously; you know exactly what you did wrong here and what you should have done instead. Testing that this doesn't happen when Copilot was not used is extremely trivial; if you're not lying about it being unintentional, the fact that it didn't occur to anyone to do it still says more than enough about what the priorities are here. At absolute best, the priorities of you and your team are so fundamentally wrong that it's impossible to trust any of you going forward.

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 3:05:29 PM

I feel like many replies are missing that this is satire

by outlore

5/3/2026 at 3:09:01 PM

What makes you say that?

by BatmanAoD

5/3/2026 at 3:29:26 PM

At a hackathon for my school recently a MS employee was a judge.

ALL he wanted to tell me was that I should give VSCode another shot: "It's good now".

You can't blame the dog, only the environment surrounding the dog.

by 4b11b4

5/3/2026 at 4:01:19 PM

Calling people dogs by analogy is not great.

That aside, corporations and groups don't make decisions. People do. We can understand and empathize with what led them to that decision (and sometimes we might be looking at the wrong person), but they're still responsible.

by NegativeK

5/3/2026 at 8:19:27 AM

Rule of thumb, such features should always be Opt-In

by croes

5/3/2026 at 8:28:59 AM

First, revert the commit, then apologise.

by grey-area

5/3/2026 at 9:33:52 AM

I did both, didn't I? :-)

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 2:46:03 PM

At the time of writing it wasn’t reverted, but thank you for replying.

by grey-area

5/3/2026 at 4:23:49 PM

I rarely comment on HN threads, but in this case big respect for coming out and owning the mistake, keep that shit up.

If more people from MS had the guts to actually talk to their users, I'd probably have a lot less to complain about at work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hopefully there's some good lessons to improve the process, not just feedback for this single incident.

by CosmicBagel

5/3/2026 at 6:18:55 PM

Thank you for your honesty, this is pretty brave.

On the other hand...this feels like a situation where possibly you should not have said anything at all? The fact that you're on HN responding feels ill-advised to me.

So far this is what I've gleaned:

- Microsoft has PMs vibe coding against VSCode (by itself not necessarily a big deal)

- Microsoft PMs can vibe code against VSCode and get stuff shipped to production with only a single approval

That second one is a huge deal in my book. What I've learned now is that VSCode, a product with an enormous deployment base, is trivially compromised if the calls are coming from inside the house. Apparently all that has to happen for all users to be affected is a PM requesting you to "please approve my PR real quick, trying to get it in." And now there's a massive change in the wild, visible to many users.

Being familiar with big corp dynamics, this really worries me. This does feel like a not-well-thought-out mistake but I can easily imagine many other scenarios that would be far worse.

How can I trust VSCode going forward? How can I reassure my employer and fellow colleagues that it's safe to use? This is really a terrible look for Microsoft and very damaging to the reputation.

I feel bad for you the engineer and PM here because with the web being what it is, folks are casting blame onto you. That's missing the point since the issue is that MSFT even let this happen in the first place. Engineering processes need to be halted and re-evaluated basically yesterday. If something like this happens again it may not be possible to rebuild the trust at all.

I hate to say it but for myself this issue makes me strongly consider switching away from VSCode permanently, something I had not seriously considered before yesterday. Best of luck to everyone on the VSCode team.

by _doctor_love

5/3/2026 at 3:33:50 AM

[flagged]

by LandoCalrissian

5/3/2026 at 6:02:50 AM

Just disable everything AI by default bro.

by ares623

5/3/2026 at 7:27:22 AM

Nobody wants this shit. There is no timeline where developers want junk inserted into their commit messages.

by Gud

5/3/2026 at 6:54:09 PM

One of my customers actually requires attribution to agents if they're used, not only for tracking purposes but also for understanding potential vectors for slopcode. It's been useful and occasionally enforced. That being said, implementation without due consideration and warning should be frowned upon.

by benchwright

5/3/2026 at 1:54:20 AM

[dead]

by jibal

5/3/2026 at 2:06:11 AM

Brave man. RIP your inbox.

by aaaronic

5/3/2026 at 8:26:53 AM

You're an idiot.

But I'm an idiot every day too, so I can relate. We can only learn from these mistakes, keep it up!

by rf15

5/2/2026 at 9:06:30 PM

One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI".

Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.

by rsynnott

5/2/2026 at 10:04:32 PM

It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.

by storus

5/2/2026 at 10:08:28 PM

Principal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job)

2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it

2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please

by mohamedkoubaa

5/2/2026 at 10:34:25 PM

To be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.

by palata

5/3/2026 at 12:30:12 AM

I saw a trend of UX/UI designers coming with practice which I knew better were wrong. But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls.

Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.

by hirako2000

5/3/2026 at 6:38:48 AM

> But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls.

[Rant-Example] The goshdarn ticketing-system hijacks alt-f, so that instead of opening the File menu of my browser, and instead toggles the favorite-status of whatever ticket I happen to be viewing.

by Terr_

5/3/2026 at 1:03:37 PM

A mistake was made early on even letting web apps see keystrokes like that. In a better world, modifier keys were used in a principled way from the start - only the window manager gets to see meta-anything, only the shell or GUI app gets to see control-anything, and web apps can work with alt-anything.

by twic

5/3/2026 at 10:27:06 AM

Have you tried creating a ticket complaining about this?

by walletdrainer

5/3/2026 at 5:37:26 PM

I did, and they probably don't care because they want everyone to use the electron app instead.

by Terr_

5/3/2026 at 12:11:44 PM

Press alt f to pay respect with the "respect my AI.thority" subscription

by cineticdaffodil

5/3/2026 at 5:46:11 AM

To be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency.

Corporate needs their Brand™ look precisely as specified in their expensive Style Guide. IBM wouldn't want the Google vibes of Android Material Design TextFields, I imagine.

Scratch beneath the visuals, and starker technical differences appear.

Safari on iOS (used to?) has a 350ms debounce delay on every tap / click, in case you want to do a multitouch gesture.

JavaScript (Frameworks) were the only way this arbitrary delay to user input could be reduced before 2015, when Apple finally released a native API for this.

https://webkit.org/blog/5610/more-responsive-tapping-on-ios/

by themanualstates

5/3/2026 at 7:50:26 AM

> To be fair, the native browser controls have had too many quirks and features fox UX/UI consistency.

Well, too many to have a single website be consistent across browsers.

But as a user I'm using one specific browsers, and I expect all websites be consistent for that browser.

by eru

5/3/2026 at 3:03:16 PM

This is what I sees getting missed in a lot of LLM conversations. They're amplifiers. Full stop. If you have good practices they supercharge them, if you had bad practices, same thing.

by wmeredith

5/3/2026 at 6:01:35 PM

Does our society generally have good, user-friendly practices?

What will amplifying its output do?

by vkou

5/3/2026 at 12:47:27 AM

With some resistance. Now they do it far more often.

by coldtea

5/2/2026 at 10:36:36 PM

That's how I got my first opportunity 20 years ago

by brazukadev

5/3/2026 at 1:13:11 AM

Don't hate the player hate the game I guess

by mohamedkoubaa

5/2/2026 at 10:42:02 PM

:'D

by conartist6

5/3/2026 at 8:11:32 AM

2026: you're fired. Hey Claude, implement bad idea please

by Kwpolska

5/3/2026 at 8:56:54 AM

That is a great idea, very inspirational!

Do you want me to implement another bad idea, too?

by cookiengineer

5/3/2026 at 5:42:45 PM

Implement bad idea, but use AI. That's the MO right now.

by JXavierH

5/3/2026 at 3:28:56 PM

Give me a break. This was already happening with Web 2.0 and things like "microservices".

by yubblegum

5/3/2026 at 4:02:34 PM

I know it's just that we are in an accelerated state of Putt's Law

by mohamedkoubaa

5/3/2026 at 5:08:21 PM

Had to look that up:

Putt's Law: "Putt's Law: "Technology is dominated by two types of people, those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand."

I suggest that this law does not give a complete description of what has been happening to software engineering in the past 2 decades:

Putt's Law does not address the (new) phenomena we first saw when 'blog hotness' and minimal effort frameworks permitted practitioners with little practical experience or hard gained knowledge to manifest technical capability and assert technical authority. The minimal amount of 'wit' required was access to a smart phone, wiki, or some blog, and you had complete juniors arguing with seniors about architecture, frameworks. AI is taking that to the extreme.

Putt's Law's relevance here is that prior to the past 2 decades of enabling tech and knowledge bases 'the clueless manager' had the metric of "older more senior more likely to be correct", and clueless juniors didn't have blogs or wikis or frameworks that required a handful of shell commands to install, and spinup a 'demo'. AI has made that even worse.

by yubblegum

5/3/2026 at 12:27:56 AM

It wasn’t AI that brought us Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards, nor the 10,000,000 ••• menus that have infested every webapp in the past 10 years as an alternative to thoughtful UI design. We humans made everything shitty before we made AI.

by xp84

5/3/2026 at 1:40:07 AM

> Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards

It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.

by drivers99

5/3/2026 at 3:21:17 AM

The "Differentiate wihout color" is one I like. All of the on/off sliders now have a 1 or 0 to indicate on/off

by dylan604

5/7/2026 at 5:52:00 AM

Funny, didn't iOS have that like 15 years ago, before they probably removed it?

by layla5alive

5/3/2026 at 2:26:03 AM

OMG this is wonderful! Thank you.

by ozzymuppet

5/3/2026 at 3:27:16 AM

A lot of people who think of themselves as able-bodied never think to poke around in the Accessibility sections of their settings menus. But it turns out that accessibility options are for everyone; people should really think of and evaluate them as first class tools more often

by isityettime

5/3/2026 at 7:42:54 AM

They really should just have a single checkbox, "Prioritise usability over wank", and leave it at that.

by pseudohadamard

5/4/2026 at 3:32:03 PM

That's an interesting idea: if you're thinking of having an accessibility option, consider just making it the default.

by drivers99

5/3/2026 at 7:44:16 AM

Or,are we just getting older and these things suddenly matter?

by theK

5/3/2026 at 8:09:11 AM

A button looking like a button isn't an age (of the reader) thing.

by oneeyedpigeon

5/3/2026 at 10:36:13 AM

Of course it is. What should a button on a screen look like, after all, it has absolutely nothing to do with a large mechanical button from the 80s the old designs tried to emulate. In fact, such buttons are becoming rare even in the physical world, the younger generation is more and more accustomed to touch buttons for operating all kinds of machinery around them. So "like a button" is very much an age thing

by usrnm

5/3/2026 at 1:36:44 PM

Looking like a "touch button" is still looking like a button. Some indication that an element is tappable is still useful.

by rodw

5/4/2026 at 8:18:18 PM

Game consoles are still pretty popular, I don't think people are going to forget what real buttons are for at least another couple of generations.

by oneeyedpigeon

5/3/2026 at 2:18:04 PM

Nah, one of the things I found in Discord's accessibility settings is an ability to turn off or reduce animations and other visual effects by default, which is wonderful no matter your ability.

by andrewflnr

5/3/2026 at 9:56:53 AM

Possibly a factor, but I also think these issues are becoming much more widespread, leaving us less able to tolerate them than when they were less common.

by duskdozer

5/3/2026 at 10:23:32 AM

These things are like a sidewalk having a ramp that was originally made for wheelchairs but then suddenly everyone uses it because it’s just a nicer experience with less chance of tripping and falling flat on your face.

by smoofles

5/3/2026 at 12:43:58 AM

Good thing we trained our fortune teller calculators on all that historic shittiness!

by befictious

5/3/2026 at 12:50:40 AM

Maybe, but at least the 10,000,000 options were there instead deemed that they are not to be used by those pesky users. And now its they are not just hidden. They are simply not there.

by iugtmkbdfil834

5/3/2026 at 12:48:23 AM

Guns and bombs also didn't create war. But they did made it way more lethal.

by coldtea

5/3/2026 at 5:25:44 PM

What is it about AI where the discussion is immediately derailed with whataboutism? Like, are these actually good faith comments? What's the point of bringing up "well some other bad stuff already existed"?

by jayd16

5/4/2026 at 4:39:50 PM

It’s not whataboutism, I’m simply challenging the notion that AI caused this. UI has been in the toilet and worsening for 15 years.

A combination of trend (minimalism cult masquerading as sophistication), pragmatic trimming down of things to work on tiny screens, dumbing down things in an attempt to reduce complexity, and of course dark patterns, to push users toward profitable actions (like clicking ads or continued ‘engagement’) and away from costly ones (finding support, for instance).

by xp84

5/3/2026 at 10:49:30 AM

It makes perfect sense / there was that talk by the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt saying something along the lines "imagine you could develop the software, but without that arrogant programmer". They just hate people, that's all.

by hansmayer

5/3/2026 at 2:36:14 PM

The sentiment is mutual.

by wiseowise

5/3/2026 at 2:41:43 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

5/3/2026 at 5:40:53 AM

100%

This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.

by ravenstine

5/3/2026 at 11:58:51 AM

To be fair, most of our industry is so stupendously bad at executing that you can keep growth and save costs by simply laying people off. No AI required.

by singpolyma3

5/3/2026 at 12:01:59 PM

That is true. AI reveals a festering problem.

by ravenstine

5/3/2026 at 10:58:53 AM

Some time ago my then project owner remarked that possibly in the future apps won't require an UI and people will just interrogate the LLM directly.

I read that as a sign to make a coordinated exit.

Truth be told our project was one of many "catalogue of stuff" kind of apps which at this and projected scale could have well been a spreadsheet in the cloud with search enhanced by LLM.

by Tade0

5/3/2026 at 4:23:44 PM

The idea of having a non-crap Siri on my phone that I could interrogate directly would be amazing.

My ADHD brain would love to do this stuff:

"Hey AI, how much is my electric bill this month?" and "Okay thats high. Pay it but remind me next week to order a new AC after researching options for me."

by elcritch

5/3/2026 at 5:39:55 PM

I'm waiting for diffusion language models to mature and go mainstream.

They're still as heavy as language models usually are, but the promise is that they'll arrive at the final result much faster.

Also it looks cool how it shifts words in place until it arrives at an answer.

by Tade0

5/3/2026 at 2:38:03 PM

> Some time ago my then project owner remarked that possibly in the future apps won't require an UI and people will just interrogate the LLM directly.

And those LLMs will run on unicorn farts and world hunger will be solved too. Do people lack basic logic or is it just when it comes to LLMs?

by wiseowise

5/3/2026 at 5:59:16 PM

In his defense, the guy is a biologist - he couldn't have known.

by Tade0

5/3/2026 at 12:30:18 AM

Bring on the feature creep and epic down time

by digitaltrees

5/3/2026 at 12:58:41 AM

Perennial HN trope: all bad tech evolutions are management's fault. Engineers are flawless paragons of technical purity.

by morpheos137

5/3/2026 at 3:10:29 AM

Hard to blame the engineer when the engineer gets fired for not implementing management's whims. As much as I'd like to hold people accountable and say they should just accept getting fired instead of compromising the ideals, the truth is I've got a family now and if they paid me enough I'd do the same.

by matheusmoreira

5/3/2026 at 3:04:04 PM

that defense did not work at nuremberg trial

by bdangubic

5/3/2026 at 9:26:56 PM

Only because the Nazis lost and the people they genocided judged them for it.

Do you think the trillionaires are losing? Do you think you're likely to end up on the judge's bench?

by matheusmoreira

5/3/2026 at 9:50:16 PM

sure did not look in 1942 like nazis were losing either. doesn’t look like in 2026 but time is a bitch and nazis eventually meet their fate

by bdangubic

5/4/2026 at 2:09:08 AM

Then make the bet. If you think the trillionaires will fall, then stand against them. Don't take their money and wait for their inevitable fall when the working class gets organized and starts eating the rich. Hope you have an answer for their AI powered automated kill bots. Man made horrors, entirely within the realm of our comprehension.

by matheusmoreira

5/4/2026 at 5:32:47 PM

> Then make the bet.

why do I need to make a bet? you mean to make money off this? I have more than I can spend in 4 lifetimes. also personally, betting is a telltale sign of a lack of intelligence so I would never make myself stoop that level where I "bet" on shit, one of the stupidest things humans do

> If you think the trillionaires will fall, then stand against them

I stand against them and would even if I didn't think they will fail.

> Don't take their money and wait for their inevitable fall

I don't take their money, don't do now and never have and never will. I would not work for a company Tesla or Meta if they offered me 7-digit salary.

> Hope you have an answer for their AI powered automated kill bots.

I personally don't but if there comes a time my assistance is needed to fight them I will gladly volunteer to help

by bdangubic

5/4/2026 at 8:50:41 PM

> also personally, betting is a telltale sign of a lack of intelligence so I would never make myself stoop that level where I "bet" on shit, one of the stupidest things humans do

Everything is a bet. Buy into something? You're betting it'll succeed. Don't buy? You're betting it'll fail.

You are always positioned. If you could have taken a 7 figure job at Tesla but chose not to, you positioned yourself accordingly. It cost you a seven figure job. What it won you, only you can know that.

Deep down, I hope you're right and I'm wrong. I just don't think it's likely.

by matheusmoreira

5/3/2026 at 3:47:17 AM

The torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management.

It couldn't exist without engineers.

by lkjdsklf

5/3/2026 at 2:17:55 PM

> The torment nexus was built by engineers. Not management.

Before the more recent wave of successful tech startups (say, from 2010 on), a very large amount of programmers were incredibly sensitive to anything related to topics like (posisbility of) surveillance, privacy, authorities (including government), centralized infrastructures, DRM etc.

In my feeling, the only reason why this mindset shifted is because from this wave on, in the USA, programmers were showered in money.

The interesting question rather is: now that tech companies want to become more frugal with respect to paying programmers, will the mindset among programmers shift back or not?

by aleph_minus_one

5/3/2026 at 6:03:55 PM

The interesting thing is despite all that money the basic functionality of tech except for llms has hardly changed for at least a decade if not more. The reason llms are showered with money is everything else is stagnant.

by morpheos137

5/3/2026 at 9:23:24 AM

Only because murdering your project manager for terrible ideas is illegal

by PunchyHamster

5/3/2026 at 5:30:01 AM

Right, workers build the world. We should run it. Actually. Why does management get to tell us what to do without elections?

by tehjoker

5/3/2026 at 11:17:27 AM

Workers are necessary but not sufficient for most businesses. You also need capital. This can be provided by the workers and is for many worker owners businesses, but when the business is very capital intensive that's just not feasible.

Are workers going to be able to fund Apple's factories or ExxonMobil's oil exploration? No, so they're not in charge.

You absolutely can start a worker owned business right now, or go work for one.

by kaashif

5/3/2026 at 8:21:35 PM

Of course. That is why state guided worker coops are a good idea. Or state incentives to provide loans at good interest rates to worker coops.

The state provides capital, the workers operate the business, make management decisions, and have democratic input like the public does.

You might say, that kind of system isn't a perfect solution, but currently we have a dictatorship of wealthy individuals and businesses who are wholly unaccountable.

by tehjoker

5/3/2026 at 3:57:59 AM

And engineers couldn't get rich themselves without the billionaires shelling out for them to build their torment nexuses.

I want to get rich too. I want to live a good life, and provide for my family. I don't want to just survive. So I can't say I don't empathize.

by matheusmoreira

5/3/2026 at 5:04:43 AM

That's fine, just know that you permanently forfeit any right to complain about others doing things for personal gain that indirectly harm yourself.

> I want to live a good life, and provide for my family.

This is a lie you're telling yourself, you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus. Billions of people do so indeed.

> I want to get rich too.

You should've stopped here, but then it became too much so you had to resort to appending that nonsense. It's pure greed at the cost of everyone else, that's all. Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.

by deaux

5/3/2026 at 2:43:32 PM

> Billions of people do so indeed.

Are they? I seriously doubt billions of people earn 200k+ salaries.

by wiseowise

5/6/2026 at 1:29:16 PM

Which is why the quoted part above it said "I want to live a good life, and provide for my family.", which billions of people do indeed.

by deaux

5/3/2026 at 8:55:08 AM

> you can do both just fine without building the torment nexus

Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.

> Simple lack of morals, impaired empathy and remorse.

Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.

Things are not looking good out there. Billions of people get by without compromising? Billions of people live in poverty too. Not something I'm looking forward to dealing with, should the great AI replacement ever come knocking on my door.

by matheusmoreira

5/3/2026 at 3:07:39 PM

And your reasoning is exactly what makes it a winning strategy. "If other people do it, then why not me?" That makes it that they are no longer other people, you yourself are a part of that group now. One could argue that it is an even worse position. It literally makes you an enabler of the problem you see in the world, while at the same time you acknowledge it as an even existential problem. When we are with billions, we cannot all be 'truly' wealthy in a material sense and by definition your wealth will come at the expense of others. Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.

by golf_mike

5/3/2026 at 3:12:24 PM

> Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.

unfortunately that is the state of our society right now and it is hard to see this changing.

by bdangubic

5/3/2026 at 8:39:51 PM

> If other people do it, then why not me?

Yeah. At some point you get tired of paying the costs that others sociopathically push onto you and start trying to take at least some of the value for yourself instead.

If society has a problem with that, then maybe it should start demonstrating it by making examples out of all those sociopaths instead of turning the other way and quietly profiting from it while the nobodies seethe impotently about things they have no power to change.

> Your reasoning makes me sad as instead of questioning what constitutes true wealth, it seems you are guided by an exclusively materialistic view of it and join the destructive behaviour you see around you out of fear of not having enough.

I'm a free software developer. I quite literally give it all away. I'm also a doctor in a 3rd world country. I work hard to help people for wages that would make 300k+/year 1st world doctors cry themselves to sleep.

I was actually fine taking the moral high road... Until a couple years ago. What changed? I got married. Got people depending on me now. So my patience and empathy for people who are not literally paying my bills is indeed starting to wear a bit thin.

Sad? No one's sadder about it than me. This existential realization gave me actual diagnosed depression. I literally go to therapy because of this shit. That sort of cold sociopathy is simply not the way I was raised.

The problem is my mind cannot deal with this corrupt world by idealizing it. For my own psychological and financial well being, I cannot continue to entertain ideas of what the world could be, if only people were good. I must interpret the world based on what's real.

by matheusmoreira

5/6/2026 at 1:34:19 PM

> If society has a problem with that, then maybe it should start demonstrating it by making examples out of all those sociopaths instead of turning the other way and quietly profiting from it while the nobodies seethe impotently about things they have no power to change.

You are the society.

> I was actually fine taking the moral high road... Until a couple years ago. What changed? I got married. Got people depending on me now. So my patience and empathy for people who are not literally paying my bills is indeed starting to wear a bit thin.

This is just an awful excuse. People depending on you is the norm, has been for all of history of humankind and remains so to this day. That's literally human life, people depending on each other. Out of all the good people in this world even at this moment who happen to be adult men, I'd wager 80% of them has had a dependent. Historically, it will have been 99.9%.

I'm happy to talk as someone who also has dependents - again, as is the global societal norm for adult men in particular (prime HN demographic) and has been since forever - and who clearly shares your view on many things about modern society, yet doesn't turn it into an excuse to help build the torment nexus.

by deaux

5/6/2026 at 1:31:45 PM

> Doubt. You don't become truly wealthy without doing what sociopathic CEOs do on a daily basis. Society actively rewards that stuff, and it's only getting worse with time.

I'm sorry but this is really basic reading skills. I quoted "have a good life and provide for family", then "both" refers to "have a good life" and "provide for family".

> Sounds like a winning strategy to me. That's the exact sort of person this world rewards.

Winning in what? Winning in becoming a disgusting person? Definitely. That tends to be the direct opposite of what people want to become though, for good reason. It's also what causes the most deathbed regret.

by deaux

5/3/2026 at 6:09:33 AM

Which would be fine if the only two choices were build the torment nexus or starve. But it's not the only source of income out there.

by SturgeonsLaw

5/3/2026 at 8:39:57 AM

Yeah, maybe you won't "starve"... But will you live? Or will you merely survive? If that?

It's not looking too good out there. We've got trillionaires bragging to people's faces about how they're all going to be replaced by their AIs. It got to the point someone threw a molotov into one CEO's home.

Source of income? The promise of AI is to literally make all humans economically redundant. In a capitalist world, what is the point of keeping economically useless people alive? People who do nothing but cost society money? Why not turn them all into soylent instead?

If we don't create a post-scarcity society now, I'm not sure we ever will. Choices aren't looking too good out there.

by matheusmoreira

5/3/2026 at 2:40:21 PM

Nuclear bomb was built by scientists and they weren't the one that fired it, what's your point?

by wiseowise

5/3/2026 at 3:01:44 PM

Their point, however, is perfectly clear - it’s practically obvious. No one forced them at gunpoint (unlike those scientists, figuratively speaking). Why are you pretending not to understand?

by allarm

5/3/2026 at 9:31:54 PM

> No one forced them at gunpoint

Of course not. Modern weapons are far more sophisticated. Society does not need to point guns at people to drive behavior anymore, it is sufficient to deploy simple economics. People feel the sting of the economic lash just the same as the literal instrument.

by matheusmoreira

5/4/2026 at 9:32:51 AM

Yeah sure :) People working in one of the most privileged professions on Earth are bound hand and foot with golden shackles and are forced - literally forced - to continue spreading evil throughout the world in order to keep their salaries of several hundred thousand dollars. The horror!

by allarm

5/4/2026 at 9:01:56 PM

Yes? Refuse, and you lose all of those privileges. The golden shackles go away and are replaced with the rusty shackles of poverty. Feeling the pressure yet?

The richer you are, the more you've got to lose. Easy to be a radical when you've got nothing. Nowhere you can go but up. If you're privileged, there's a long way to fall.

by matheusmoreira

5/4/2026 at 10:06:54 PM

That's pathetic. It's not all or nothing situation, not even close.

by allarm

5/3/2026 at 7:34:55 AM

Remind me who makes the final decisions in these scenarios. Also, how do boots taste?

by antonvs

5/3/2026 at 1:59:49 PM

Of course there are shitty engineers, but they aren't allowed to do anything without shitty management.

by jazzypants

5/3/2026 at 3:14:24 PM

Found the project manager

by uncircle

5/3/2026 at 12:58:21 AM

On the other hand, no one to place the blame on if management does it themselves.

by xnx

5/3/2026 at 1:41:46 PM

The recent cases of companies who deleted their prod DBs while using LLMs are blaming “the rogue AI”. So it seems you can just blame AI lab companies and folks roll with it. Even better, they asked it to generate its own apology, no need to spend time trying to explain to your customers why everything is gone

by dgellow

5/3/2026 at 3:45:36 AM

That's definitely not true.

There's always people for management to blame. That's the great part of being management.

By definition, there's someone/thing you're managing that you can pass the blame onto.

by lkjdsklf

5/3/2026 at 4:42:40 PM

Most members of management were individual contributors beforehand. I say this just because it is remarkably common for people to assign malign intent or stupidity to people doing jobs that they themselves haven’t done and don’t frankly understand.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. In many cases you’d be right. I’m just saying it’s remarkable how much certainty people have even when it comes to things they know they don’t know.

by AbrahamParangi

5/3/2026 at 12:11:15 AM

Aren't you guys glad there are no programmers gatekeeping programming with their "morals" and "etiquette"? Any marketer with an LLM can update the programming tool now. AI really levels the playing field and it's time for pesky programmers to get off their high horse, don't you think? :)

by panny

5/3/2026 at 5:23:03 AM

Come off it. Sure some of them had "morals" but a decent chunk of them just lacked the imagination or connections to monetize their lack of morals.

by lmz

5/3/2026 at 1:01:53 PM

after 2+ years of non-engineers vibecoding applications, show me one startup/app without devs.

by biosboiii

5/2/2026 at 10:07:39 PM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.

I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.

by ExoticPearTree

5/2/2026 at 10:46:19 PM

> greed

Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?

I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.

If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.

To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?

by makeitdouble

5/3/2026 at 2:54:57 AM

The Seven Deadly Sins provide an interesting perspective to human psychology even in modern times. Greed / avarice is defined as wanting more than you need.

by kukkeliskuu

5/3/2026 at 2:46:23 PM

Who decides how much you need?

by wiseowise

5/4/2026 at 11:12:11 PM

Based on your nickname, you?

I was recently using an inexpensive paper shredder. I had an urge to put in too many papers at one time, which jams the shredder. Taking into account the time needed to unjam the shredder, the end result is that it takes more time for me to process the papers if I give in to my urge than if I resist the urge and only put in just the right amount of papers. Then I can claim that the "shredder is of bad quality", instead of seeing how I contribute to the problem.

As my aim was to shred papers efficiently, my "sin" (sin = to miss the mark, not to hit the aim) was greed, and the virtuous path is to successfully to resist the urge. The blessing I get from the virtuous path is the joy of the flow when I efficiently shred the papers.

Yesterday, I was in a shop when I was hungry, and I felt the urge to buy a large chocolate bar. Being hungry, it would have been a constant struggle not to eat all of it if I had bought it. Eating a whole large chocolate bar does not make me feel so good.

As my personal aim is to feel good, eating a whole large chocolate bar at one go is a sin in relation to that aim. I successfully resisted the urge to buy the large chocolate bar -- and did so by buying a small one. That way I did not "sin" too much towards my aim of feeling good, because small chocolate bar did not affect my well-being almost at all.

On the surface, it might appear more virtuous to not buy any chocolate bar. However, I know myself from prior experience that if I had "successfully" resisted the natural urge at the shop, it might have caused me to later to be unable to later resist the urge to buy a large chocolate bar from a kiosk.

So knowing myself to be the imperfect human being in these scenarios, buying a small chocolate bar at the shop was actually more aligned with my aim of feeling good than not buying it, because the end result was more aligned with my aim of feeling good.

Modern psychology would probably say that this urge is in my superego. Maybe as a child, I learned that I don't usually get what I need, so when something is available, I feel the urge to take as much as I can -- i.e. greed is something that I will encounter in many things that I do, keeping me from hitting the mark. As this is very common way humans miss the mark and deeper in the psychology, it is a Deadly Sin.

Some theological and psychological perspectives posit that the belief that this urge is a part of me -- i.e. I identify with the urge, I believe that "I am greedy" -- is actually part of the problem. So a better formulation would be instead of "WHO decides how much I need" to ask "WHAT IN ME decides how much I need". And then, what is a healthy and useful relationship towards those urges. And it may be different in different circumstances, hence resisting the urge to put in too many papers, but replacing the urge with a lesser one in case of chocolate bars.

The point might not be to learn to "control" the urge -- we can learn from system theory that excessive control might cause a backlash -- in terms of some systems even literally. More healthy relationship is often to just observe -- and then learn how such urges affect my well-being -- i.e. to learn more about myself. Often the observation itself is enough to have an effect.

We can take a corporate analogy (literally, corpus = body) and ask, what in organizations (again, organization has the same literal root as organism) cause them to be "greedy". In other words, what drives organizations to have an urge for excessive profits that they ignore the harms they cause to employees, society at large or even customers (i.e. enshittification). This urge appears very similar as the urge in humans.

That question will lead to other interesting questions about politics, economics etc. For example, you can ask, what is the aim of such corporations, and whether that aim produces results aligned with the aims of societies at large, etc.

by kukkeliskuu

5/3/2026 at 12:48:58 PM

maybe long term vs. short term is the key idea. apple, for example, could rake in bountiful measures in the short term if they ventured away from their boutique-electronic-consumer-goods niche. in the long run it would hurt their bottom line to do so

by techno303

5/2/2026 at 10:56:49 PM

Approximately everybody would like more money.

Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.

Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.

by estimator7292

5/3/2026 at 12:24:06 AM

I think there's one more factor that is crucially important — greedy people lack long-term vision, and care a lot more about money now than they do about potentially much more money in the future.

I suppose it's kind of interesting that you could measure greed as an unusually high discount rate for the time value of money?

by pdpi

5/3/2026 at 9:50:57 AM

> Approximately everybody would like more money.

For me (and many others), money is a means to an end. I don’t want money per se, I want housing and food and things that money can buy.

But for a few, money is the goal. They want money for the sake of more money. They don’t need more. That’s greed.

by WhyNotHugo

5/3/2026 at 1:49:27 AM

> Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business

In my experience, it's much simpler.

People are greedy if they make things I want cost more.

by parineum

5/3/2026 at 4:46:40 PM

I'm old generation and almost forgot for a while. GitHub was good even on their hands at the beginning, C# is amazing, TypeScript is amazing, wsl2 is game changer (which includes the change in Microsoft's position about linux), vscode is amazing, microsoft great increase in presence on opensource was nice (rushstack for example), etc...

But well, they still have the garbage side, which seems to be spreading again.

by rafael-lua

5/4/2026 at 7:25:31 AM

I second the C# praise: we have a few teams building software with C# and having to debug it here and there, it is very modern, compiles cross-platform and has lots of functionality already built-in and from the release notes I read from time to time, the people behind it know what they are doing.

by ExoticPearTree

5/4/2026 at 2:14:50 PM

I used to work at a C# firm and we always called it "Microsoft Java", but that's such an insult. C# is way better, I've really enjoyed writing in it.

And it actually has pretty good interop with C++/CLI, too.

by yuye

5/3/2026 at 2:37:42 AM

> Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.

More likely, never learned about it in the first place, save a few whispers. Who's got time to go digging in deep, when there's 'experiments to run, research to be done' ...

> I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.

new blood, new greed

by ninjagoo

5/3/2026 at 2:45:01 PM

> Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.

And they're right.

by wiseowise

5/2/2026 at 10:11:09 PM

AI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything.

It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.

by cyanydeez

5/2/2026 at 11:35:40 PM

Whomever at Microsoft is making these decisions and oversees all this, yeeeesh

by ProofHouse

5/3/2026 at 12:28:50 AM

Isn't that just like.. what Microsoft has always been? Browser wars, Tay, bad behavior around open source software.. This is how they roll. They're being their best selves.

by jcgrillo

5/3/2026 at 2:34:21 AM

The difference

(Previously) Microsoft EVP: "Dumb decision" -> org executes

(Now) Microsoft PM: "Dumb decision related to AI" -> team immediately executes

So they've pushed bad decision making down the hierarchy?

by ethbr1

5/3/2026 at 2:36:45 AM

That's a good point, but literally every company I know of is doing that rn. They're still doing it in a distinctly Microsofty way.

by jcgrillo

5/3/2026 at 5:32:32 AM

Tay turned out poorly, but it's a strange inclusion. It was simply a research project that failed.

by HWR_14

5/3/2026 at 12:43:45 AM

Thank you for this. I completely agree. Microsoft has always been awful, and the likely always will be. However, the did strike gold a handful of times, and they are just reliable enough to feed enterprises.

by hirvi74

5/3/2026 at 1:03:54 AM

Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc... All the established players have their own distinct flavor of awful. This incident is just a very on-brand flavor for Microsoft.

by jcgrillo

5/3/2026 at 3:17:53 PM

The fish rots from the head. The AI push, the destruction of Windows are the result of Nadella's strategy.

by uncircle

5/3/2026 at 6:19:53 AM

The industry spent decades preaching us about power savings, with Microsoft settings application lecturing about power saves and the update app programming them on renewables peak, only for... wasting gigawatts by forcing us to have copilot everywhere.

If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.

by shaky-carrousel

5/3/2026 at 9:14:25 AM

They asked developers to help them improve windows battery life on laptops, competing against chromebooks and macbooks.

The AI gigawatts are all in data centers.

They never cared for the environment (in this way, at least).

by pletnes

5/3/2026 at 10:11:59 AM

Windows still asks you to reduce the refresh rate of your monitor from 240Hz to 60Hz in order to save the environment.

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 11:45:37 AM

Mine dont

by watwut

5/3/2026 at 8:33:24 AM

In literally must have missed that. When did Microsoft ever encourage energy saving? Is this related to power saving for extending laptop battery runtime? But then I don't get the link to renewable energy.

Anyway, I agree with the notion of the extreme energy-inefficiency of LLMs. The scale of it makes it hard to imagine any less efficient product will ever be invented.

by carschno

5/3/2026 at 8:38:41 AM

They literally have a green leaf next to power saving options. Also, there's an option in windows upgrades to time the upgrades to when the grid is mostly renewables.

by shaky-carrousel

5/3/2026 at 9:04:23 PM

Could this be hacked to schedule upgrades to only happen when the user is not about to join a meeting in 5 minutes?

"Yeah, uh, my local electric provider is burning coal 24/7 except at 9-10 pm on these 5 dates each year...."

by i_think_so

5/2/2026 at 9:16:26 PM

When I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned.

Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.

by kami23

5/3/2026 at 7:50:37 AM

If you're using Claude, try /grill-me before getting it to start working on things.

by pseudohadamard

5/2/2026 at 10:34:03 PM

Has always been the case. Corporations hate standards and would rather lock you in except where market forces prevent them. It was a miracle we have something like the internet - and the government had to create it.

Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.

by pocksuppet

5/3/2026 at 4:23:04 PM

Except the standards other & regulations that increase the barrier for market entry. They love those standards once they feel sufficiently entrenched.

by dspillett

5/2/2026 at 9:21:43 PM

> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.

by krainboltgreene

5/2/2026 at 9:49:33 PM

These next few years are the real turning point. If they are right about AI and robotic workforces, then it's checkmate--they don't need us anymore, and we're next for the furnace. If they're wrong... well, I don't know... Will there be any consequences? Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

by ryandrake

5/3/2026 at 3:52:48 AM

The AI tool providers need companies and customers to pay for the tools and automation. If all the white collar jobs in the Western world are replaced by AI or AI generated SAAS products, some 60% percent the workforce suddenly won't have jobs. If such a large percentage of the workforce has no income through employment, who will be able to pay for the services from SAAS providers and thus ultimately the AI providers?

The tradesmen working on my house renovations aren't consuming SAAS products during their day jobs.

The white collar workforce can't rapidly switch to blue collar jobs.

So for these companies to remain viable, they need the white collar workers to still somehow end up with enough money to pay for services that ultimately the companies provide.

Maybe the turning point will be a recognition that companies can't only focus on maximising shareholder value. They also need to consider their role in maintaining and improving the societies they operate in.

by fian

5/2/2026 at 10:41:06 PM

There will always be jobs for private security, firefighters, and utility repairmen to protect / restore the data centers when people inevitably attack them.

There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.

by thephyber

5/2/2026 at 11:06:39 PM

Why will there always be these jobs, if the technofascists are right? They're creating enslaved sentience. Even the class traitor police want a union, fight for more pay.

What's uniquely un-automate-able about those jobs in their dream future?

by krainboltgreene

5/3/2026 at 12:06:04 AM

Never underestimate the capabilities of a desperate human.

by thephyber

5/3/2026 at 12:39:22 AM

I don't think you understood my question.

by krainboltgreene

5/2/2026 at 9:57:15 PM

Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago.

Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.

AI companies are in trouble.

by le-mark

5/2/2026 at 10:09:00 PM

I see one profitable enterprise for AI that involves spying on everyone, managing their lives (or otherwise) tightly, automating foreign conquests and needing to make only the top decisions while delegating everything else, like a king. I can see a group or one could say a class of people that would happily invest in such future.

by storus

5/2/2026 at 10:44:33 PM

Exactly. I keep saying, AI is not useful to us. There will be no AI companies.

Even this supposed profitable enterprise, the people involved are absolutely too moronic to be able to control the thing they try to invent, it will just be a matter of time before it turns around and eliminates them as well...

by smaudet

5/2/2026 at 10:46:42 PM

Not all AI companies are the same.

Some are piling on masses of debt to built capacity (eg. Oracle). Others are just reinvesting the profits from the rest of their company (eg. Google, Meta).

Anthropic’s moat is their best tool, Claude Code.

OpenAI’s moat is the brand of ChatGPT, once the fastest growing app in the history of the world.

It’s possible that open weight models keep pace, but it’s also possible that the investment to train them becomes prohibitively expensive and open weight models cease to keep pace with the large foundation model companies.

by thephyber

5/2/2026 at 11:09:13 PM

I really don't think open models will lose. I think they are cheaper to train because they have to be more efficient than the monstrosities we have now.

There is no theory that says the current frontier models cannot exist in models with 1/100th the compute waste ;). When we start trending in that direction, and oh wow we truly are, there will be no reason for these services. You could run them on your own hardware without serious investments.

The moat openai and anthropic have is them among others have attempted to buy all of the computer hardware for the next two years. That's intentional. They know the only existential threat to them is anyone coming up with a way to do this better than them. It's already happened and it's going to become more and more divergent.

by 2ndorderthought

5/3/2026 at 1:34:43 AM

I’m interested in learning more about your theory that these models can be trained more cheaply. Is anyone doing it from scratch, rather than adversarial distillation?

by drivebyhooting

5/3/2026 at 1:45:26 AM

It is a lot cheaper to train a 27b model such as qwen3.6 which you can even vibe code or agentic code with than it is to train a 1t+ parameter model. It runs on a single commodity GPU for goodness sake

It's not a theory. These smaller models that are coming out are huge advances for the field.

I can't comment on companies training practices. That would be proprietary stuff I guess. I think the claims that the advances being made are due to distillation alone are completely unfair. The advances alone are not just data.

by 2ndorderthought

5/3/2026 at 2:43:45 AM

It almost doesn’t matter if it’s trained using adversarial distillation - if it’s nearly as good, and one-hundredth the cost, the choice is obvious.

by freeone3000

5/2/2026 at 11:28:28 PM

Open weight models will keep pace because capable open-weight models are China's strategy for preventing a closed takeover of AI by the West.

by matthewdgreen

5/3/2026 at 12:04:40 AM

US megatechs stole copyrighted data to train their. Hyper expensive models.

Chinese megatechs stole copyrighted data AND trained their models on derivative / synthetic data that came from the US foundation models.

I’m happy Chinese foundation model trainers were able to use Huawei (homegrown) hardware to train their models (also because having Nvidia dominate that sector is terrible for competition), but if Chinese megatech companies are just deriving their open weights models from US companies, then this is just an IP theft exercise.

by thephyber

5/3/2026 at 1:54:31 AM

One of the double edge swords I see is devs/evangelists pushing agentic coding are playing the 'good enough' statement. If that is true and those asking for software can live with good enough AI code, the moment the free local models hit that level the party is over in the continual push to the premium tip of the spear models.

by heelix

5/3/2026 at 3:28:08 AM

We might already be there. I've been running Qwen-3.6-27B with 8-bit quantization locally with llama.cpp (~100k context window), and to be honest for my use case, 40-50% of the time it is more usable than claude-code. I only have the $20/mo plan, so I often hit rate limits after 2-3 prompts. And while the local model is slower, it just keeps chugging, is practically free, and more often than not produces code similar to claude. I wouldn't be surprised if in 6-12 months we have local models which are comparable to opus 4.6...which I personally consider as a tipping point where agentic coding became practical.

by neutrinobro

5/2/2026 at 10:23:43 PM

What does their patent moat look like?

by pfdietz

5/2/2026 at 11:02:24 PM

Google owns the core transformer patent(s), for one thing, e.g. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en.

I haven't read the claims, so I don't know how easy it will be to work around them. This particular one seems to cover encoder-decoder networks, so it's not necessarily applicable to later LLM implementations. But I'd be amazed if Google didn't have several other relevant patents in their arsenal.

by CamperBob2

5/2/2026 at 9:52:17 PM

I guess if they are wrong the world economy crashes and burn again, because they wasted all these shiny dollars on infra build out. It's lose lose.

by HeavyStorm

5/2/2026 at 10:30:18 PM

A few percent of your net worth, when you're sitting on top of a pile of gold like a dragon on a yacht is one thing, but when you're a retiree, and you're on a fixed income, living off the proceeds from an annuity and a reverse mortgage, and inflation in all its forms is eating into the plan you had, and you don't have any backup, yes there will be consequences!

by fragmede

5/2/2026 at 9:53:22 PM

> Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.

by bdangubic

5/2/2026 at 10:26:41 PM

Initially I assumed that when the bubble burst, some VCs would go bust, Oracle would go bust, a few hyperscalers would take a significant haircut but carry on, and life would pretty much go on. However there's now sufficient dodgy AI-related debt making its way onto the debt markets that the bubble burst could be a lot messier, and it may be more than a few percent.

by rsynnott

5/2/2026 at 11:37:18 PM

Wouldn't mind a repeat of 2008, if it means that Oracle goes out of business.

by nz

5/3/2026 at 2:27:36 AM

LOL.

Robotics isn't even 1% of the way to replacing anything.

Consider why every neat demo is a backflip and not washing the dishes or laying bricks or something.

by XorNot

5/2/2026 at 9:51:20 PM

People (well, American people (disclosure, I am an American)), used to be scared/worried that Silicon Valley will eventually move to Bangalore or Shenzhen, because of wage-discrepancies, and so on -- and it is not a totally unreasonable concern, considering that the _Silicon_ part of Silicon Valley has been slowly relocated to Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and a few others. At this point, maybe we should start pushing that the _rest_ of Silicon Valley gets relocated somewhere else, too.

It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.

by nz

5/3/2026 at 12:12:44 AM

No country would want them.

by 2ndorderthought

5/3/2026 at 1:39:25 AM

If you have worked in Silicon Valley you know that Bangalore and Shenzhen came here ;)

In all seriousness, the silicon is still designed in Silicon Valley but maybe you don't hear about that as much? Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, AMD, Nvidia, etc. all have a huge presence there still.

by krupan

5/3/2026 at 10:42:26 AM

I meant the actual fabrication of silicon ;)

Just to emphasize my point, China is not being deprived of chip _designs_ (via export bans of ASML-made lithography equipment), but rather of the actual physical machines that rearrange the atoms.

by nz

5/3/2026 at 10:49:07 PM

Did the actual fabrication of silicon ever happen in Silicon Valley? If it did it left a loooong time ago

by krupan

5/2/2026 at 9:45:15 PM

BUT it is a trap: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20617v1

by outside1234

5/2/2026 at 10:08:18 PM

One things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI.

We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.

by 2ndorderthought

5/2/2026 at 10:39:38 PM

Didn’t get the “scary” part. I also keep my entertainment to the minimum dependencies possible. I try to rely on stuff I own: music cds, iso videogames + emulators, physical books or ebooks (thanks Anna), exercise outdoors… ditching streaming like netflix/youtube, buying crap on amazon, uber, etc

by sdevonoes

5/2/2026 at 10:49:54 PM

Scary = “if I have no future prospects for work”

It’s the combination of AI changing the workplace, the large techs shedding double digit headcount, recruiting / hiring departments being so broken by the AI arms race hitting job applications, and the macro business environment generally being on the downward slope at the moment.

by thephyber

5/2/2026 at 10:57:22 PM

Scary part is not having a job right now that's all. It's not scary walking around getting more vitamin d

by 2ndorderthought

5/2/2026 at 10:06:47 PM

This feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it

by whattheheckheck

5/3/2026 at 11:32:05 AM

Automation tax solves all the problems? Seriously? The tax would go to retraining programs, according to the linked paper, so that workers can be reabsorbed into the workforce. Undiscussed conditio sine qua non: the economy has room for additional workforce, the government - as the distributor of said tax - has implemented sufficient legislation into social networks to ensure the tax goes to these programs and not another pointless war or subsidies for agriculture or tax relief for the rich.

This paper proposes a solution for which the framework/base is missing.

by frm88

5/2/2026 at 9:58:25 PM

Turns out it's not infinitely spawnable after all.

by pron

5/2/2026 at 11:09:42 PM

There's a lot of flaws with their fantasy world, that's not even the most prominent one.

by krainboltgreene

5/2/2026 at 10:28:58 PM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

Mmm... I think I missed that part.

by diego_sandoval

5/2/2026 at 10:39:11 PM

Not everyone bought it, but they campaigned hard...and now see it was all just a dog and pony show. The hold-outs were right...

by smaudet

5/3/2026 at 1:27:49 AM

Not really. A company is not one monolithic entity with a single will. Far more plausible than "it was all a trick" is that for a time, people were in charge who really were trying to improve things, and now, those people have been replaced with others who are willing to burn it all down.

by bigstrat2003

5/3/2026 at 12:07:43 AM

Before 2010 or so, “serious” internet developers wouldn’t touch Microsoft stuff — Microsoft was for office memos and poorly structured spreadsheets and that was it.

So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.

by ninjalanternshk

5/3/2026 at 12:28:14 AM

That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?

Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.

Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them

by Demiurge

5/3/2026 at 1:11:34 AM

> Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft.

Developers as users, sure. MSFT was common. Developers as responsible for infrastructure, MSFT anything was considered a huge risk and unreliable in the 90s.

Granted, my memory retains only a general narrative...I remember a shift by 2002ish when I started to see windows servers as perfectly fine machines for closet/under-the-table infra you didn't care too much about anyway. By 2004 they were moving out of the closet, so to speak. Then those machines became more important because more was being done with them and were considered "just as good" as any other OS. Developers that had experience, with their MSFT certs in hand, were cheaper too. It was a slow progression to eat into the corporate marketshare. By 2006 virtual machines were ubiquitous and you could run MSFT virtualized. Many companies do that by default today for workspace controls. I have never and would never choose to use MSFT products (including Azure) for business critical infra. MSFT acquiring Github was great for them, and the death of it for me. I'm probably an old outlier, but I 'member.

by Supermancho

5/3/2026 at 2:54:32 PM

I think the first shift was the reckoning with Windows NT actually being decent software. Windows 2000 (AKA NT 5.0) included Active Directory, WebDAV support, and a host of other features that were genuinely useful in a sysadmin setting [0]. Also, it shipped with IE5 which introduced XMLHttpRequest and was the best web browser by a mile. Between their pushy sales reps and so much stuff being included by default, I think it got kind of hard to push for anything else for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000

by jazzypants

5/3/2026 at 1:19:57 AM

> PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe

Right, those are all desktop applications. Microsoft has long owned that market.

I said “internet developers” meaning web sites, servers, apps, etc. Microsoft’s early offerings in that space, plus all the pain they inflicted with Internet Explorer, is what took years to overcome.

by ninjalanternshk

5/3/2026 at 5:41:02 AM

As an MS dev at the time: MS missed The Web and Mobile, thinking Office would be enough. Everything since is catchup.

On the one hand MS was a web pioneer — asynchronous web calls and ActiveX technologies that were surprisingly capable — but these were peripheral to their main goals.

Instead of MS extending their unified development platform outwards, something .Net promised to enable, effectively the opposite happened. .Net chased Java, but Java was being pushed out by Ruby on Rails. .Net web starts chasing RoR, but then Node is getting cool. .Net Web starts chasing Node and that effort splits .Net into uhhhhh ‘Framework’ uhhh ‘standard’ (ie Old-and-working), and .Net Core (what a container based web stack VM needs to look like).

The problem at that point, IMO/IME, is that Node is JavaScript, and those awesome server-side geniuses dump too-easy tooling while recreating every problem of every stack ever (ie LeftPad, loosely goosey versioning, and NPM being a crypto hackers wet dream). The .Net that started as Enterprise Server Stuff is now kinda sorta ‘Whatever’ about versioning, stability, roadmaps, and platform planning. Everything from DataAccess to GUI was churned needlessly for almost a decade, and everyone using that platform looks and feels like an a-hole because huge swaths of MS tech is abandonware resulting in perpetual rewrites of recent-term work and silos of competence.

No one can explain what framework to use to write a basic windows application anymore… Office uses React, and Windows does too… the fat cats who made MS into M$ knew better than that, the M$ who chased cloud growth and cut staff for stock price has never cared.

by bonesss

5/2/2026 at 11:26:24 PM

Hackernews used to experience a collective paroxysm of joy every time a new Visual Studio Code dropped. There definitely was a pervasive belief that the Nadella era ushered in a cuddly new Microsoft.

by bitwize

5/3/2026 at 12:46:24 AM

I remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O

by danlugo92

5/3/2026 at 3:30:49 AM

Most likely more a difference of venue. I saw lots of that on Slashdot. Less of it on Digg or Reddit. Virtually none of it here, but it seems to be making a resurgence in the form of "Macroslop" and related epithets

by isityettime

5/3/2026 at 1:28:20 AM

Lol, yep! That actually goes way back before 2010. It probably started in the early 90's, at least

by krupan

5/3/2026 at 9:37:50 AM

Yup, and windows was generally called 'mustdie' back then.

by lstodd

5/3/2026 at 1:20:06 AM

Both things can be true. VSCode did help us get to the point where I can use it on Linux, MacOS, or Windows and have a lot interoperability. It's the typical cycle. All it takes is a couple people to get their hands on managing the code to turn anything into garbage.

by hparadiz

5/3/2026 at 6:49:21 AM

This was later—into their We U+2764 Open Source era. M$ and stuff dates from like the mid-late 90s. In the late 2010s was when they started publicly acknowledging that open source exists, acquiring GitHub, and releasing things like .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and a lot of people in the open source camp did a "pointing soyjaks" and forgot that the Halloween Documents existed and that EEEing open source was already in their playbook.

by bitwize

5/3/2026 at 7:33:01 AM

[dead]

by wetpaws

5/3/2026 at 1:25:51 AM

They went from demonizing open source software to buying GitHub, releasing their own open source software (including VSCode), and hosting Linux on Azure. Huge changes! But of course it ends up being another Embrace and Extend move by the masters of that tactic

by krupan

5/3/2026 at 12:36:33 AM

Remember “Microsoft <3 Linux”

by discordance

5/3/2026 at 12:44:46 AM

I tried my hardest to block that out of my memory. Everyone knew their fingers were crossed behind their backs.

by hirvi74

5/3/2026 at 1:29:28 AM

I think it's true though. They don't care about Windows anymore, that's plain as day. Most of their software is now cross-platform. Who cares about Windows if you are selling Azure instead and people can run Linux on that?

by anonymars

5/2/2026 at 9:29:02 PM

They invested billions. They're scared.

by janice1999

5/2/2026 at 10:15:41 PM

> They invested billions. They're scared.

They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.

I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.

by ExoticPearTree

5/2/2026 at 11:15:51 PM

"good" is not important for software anymore, at least in the regular consumer market. Companies have discovered that people will just continue to accept subpar, unfinished and sometimes even partially-functioning software.

by b00ty4breakfast

5/2/2026 at 11:35:48 PM

"accept" is such a weird word for this, though I don't know of a better one in English.

What we seem to be experiencing is a combination of monopoly power/abuse, and regulatory/government/court capture to keep it in place.

by justinclift

5/3/2026 at 12:19:10 AM

if internet comments are any kind of indication (which they very well may not be) I've seen lots of people complaining about win11 but remaining because they can't give up playing their favorite online hero shooter. That's acceptance to me

by b00ty4breakfast

5/3/2026 at 12:43:11 AM

"tolerate" would be the better word to describe it

by chillfox

5/3/2026 at 12:34:45 AM

Agree that acceptance is irrelevant. No one has a choice, because all the “competitors” in any given niche (phone, cloud platform, PC operating system) are executing the same play. Enshittify, extract profit from ~suckers~ customers, ignore any churn because with the limited choices available there will be new suckers to replace them.

We accept this the same way we accept the air quality wherever we are.

Yes, Linux is there, but consider the barriers to the average person of truly adopting a strict Free Software life. Consider how many things in life now simply demand for you to have an Android or iOS phone. Things as simple as parking.

by xp84

5/3/2026 at 1:32:06 AM

Well, now no one has to convince anyone to shell out for upgrades because everything is a subscription. What worked perfectly well can now get replaced out from under you overnight

by anonymars

5/2/2026 at 10:18:41 PM

Making good products simply no longer seems to be on the agenda for most of these companies.

by rsynnott

5/3/2026 at 3:32:39 AM

Making good products was never Microsoft's MO. Even during the peak of the Nadella era, the good bits were side shows. Microsoft Office and Windows have always been things that succeed primarily via network effects/lock-in.

by isityettime

5/2/2026 at 10:24:56 PM

Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.

by altmanaltman

5/2/2026 at 11:42:29 PM

[dead]

by kcguyu

5/3/2026 at 1:14:00 AM

> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.

I really liked Copilot - it gave you a lot of tokens across a bunch of models and their agentic features were perfectly serviceable, alongside it being really affordable! And then they moved over to usage based billing and it no longer has that advantage over the alternatives: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

I still think they have a really good AI tab autocomplete implementation and it's nice to be able to use that in VSC without swapping to another editor altogether... but that's not enough to really make me pay for their subscription. I could probably move to Zed altogether if I had a problem with VSC itself, though at least the base editor doesn't feel like it has been enshittified and I quite like it, all things considered.

by KronisLV

5/2/2026 at 11:00:21 PM

Good products are not profitable enough. Not that good products are profitable at all, but if it doesn't make disgusting amounts of money this quarter it's not worth considering at all.

We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death

by estimator7292

5/2/2026 at 11:21:40 PM

The formulas used for asset valuations blow up when growth turns negative.

by Gibbon1

5/2/2026 at 10:17:14 PM

> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions

They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...

by bigyabai

5/3/2026 at 12:04:14 AM

I know a few people who worked on Azure’s FedRAMP ATOs, and “good” is not a word I’ve ever heard them use.

by bigfatkitten

5/2/2026 at 11:02:40 PM

That's largely a product of work in the 2010s. What's their next Azure? Clippy on steroids probably won't cut it.

by rsynnott

5/3/2026 at 1:27:17 AM

Their next Azure is the same as the next App Store and the next YouTube; they are services, you just keep operating them while they're in the green.

Microsoft's B2C reputation is undeniably burnt, but their B2B mindshare is unshakable.

by bigyabai

5/4/2026 at 7:21:38 AM

In my experience so far with Azure, it shines at one single thing: IAM and to be used as an IdP.

Even with the free version you get phish-resistant MFA, SAML, OIDC, OAuth.

But go beyond that and it is messy:

- creating a single VM is an extremely convoluted process

- Intune needs up to 24 hours to appply changes to a managed computer

- There are at least two management consoles for Entra. Each with slightly different functionalities.

I don’t know how Microsoft is organized internally, but it feels like product organizations don’t talk to eachother and everybody is is just building stuff on top of Azure as if their thing is the only product MS ships.

by ExoticPearTree

5/2/2026 at 11:41:54 PM

the cloud used because execs have already got a microsoft contract. (not to mention the fun licensing problem)

by tacticus

5/2/2026 at 10:12:27 PM

They invested billions. They can exit in 6 months if this thing stays afloat.

I don't think it's fear; it's greed.

by cyanydeez

5/3/2026 at 1:29:26 AM

And they aren't the only ones! The bubble might be reaching it's size limits

by krupan

5/3/2026 at 8:04:29 AM

Good thing they are holding the economy at gunpoint.

by nicbou

5/3/2026 at 5:45:26 AM

GMAIL in the web is so shitty, I literally switched over to another provider. I don't know how anyone can use them as their webmail client. You can't make sense of longer mail threads with forwards, answers etc. in between - it becomes an unreadable hot mess.

by rcbdev

5/3/2026 at 11:57:53 AM

Would you tell us which provider/client you switched to?

by jaskerr

5/3/2026 at 11:24:52 AM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

When did this happen?

by GaryBluto

5/3/2026 at 12:08:11 PM

When they started embracing and using Linux, WSL is pretty good. But it doesn't completely wash out it's past.

by wallst07

5/3/2026 at 12:45:18 PM

Dotnet core was also a move in that direction with large portions being open source.

by camdenreslink

5/3/2026 at 2:48:00 PM

That wasn't rehabilitation, they just wanted to save the dying platform.

by wiseowise

5/3/2026 at 7:55:25 AM

> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX.

I’m sure Google cares very much about UX as a funnel into their ad brokerage, but was there some time when they cared about it in the user’s interest?

Maybe that magical moment when the results page showed the results first?

by biztos

5/2/2026 at 10:21:34 PM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.

by AlexandrB

5/2/2026 at 11:29:10 PM

The thing the annoys me the most (to use polite language) is that product design went off the window with the AI craze. You could probably ship actual products that actual people would want to use, but instead everyone wants to turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface, the crabs of software, the purpose, goal, and telos of technology. It drives me nuts.

by avd201

5/3/2026 at 10:02:08 AM

A text input field for entering your command line(s), with a text log for the output, does indeed seem to be the crabs of software. Usually with some abstractions that allow you to write longer scripts[1] and just refer to them by a short name or alias, and compose those scripts together from your command prompt.

You could say it's the terminal[2] user interface.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/script

[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/terminal

by quectophoton

5/3/2026 at 1:22:40 PM

While this is very pithy, we need to acknowledge and remember that there's a gulf of difference between normal terminal interfaces and command line interfaces, and whatever the chatbots are doing.

Yes, both have a prompt where you type text to do things and get text back, but the type of text you write in one is very different than what you'd write in another. Prose versus commands and so on. Oh, and normal terminals don't waste electricity and water in amounts approaching small countries.

by sham1

5/3/2026 at 2:52:11 AM 

  > turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface
i have seen this first-hand, so many chat bots added to so many screens... like how about just make the ux better? well, that wouldn't look good at individual/team review time cause its not "using ai", so its not a suprise that's what we are getting.

by andrekandre

5/3/2026 at 2:35:35 AM

> And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX

Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.

by jorvi

5/2/2026 at 9:11:27 PM

The only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?

by pjc50

5/3/2026 at 1:59:44 PM

>There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit

That reminds me of a few years ago when Android phones replaced the behavior of "long press sleep/power button" from "shut down" to "ask AI about what's in your screen". Perhaps a manager got promoted somewhere for "raising AI usage" in Android phones.

by giovannibonetti

5/3/2026 at 2:16:44 PM

[dead]

by inquirerGeneral

5/2/2026 at 10:10:25 PM

Its even worse in my eyes, they dont even offer a model they themselves maintain.

by giancarlostoro

5/3/2026 at 6:41:19 AM

> all that matters is "pls use our AI".

If you look at the staggering amounts of money that have been put into the tech, this attitude becomes practically mandatory, in an inhuman sense. They have to get ROI, at literally any cost. And it shows.

by zombot

5/3/2026 at 6:17:55 AM

Yeah, even .NET is now plagued with AI, see AI dashboard on Aspire, AI components on Blazor, .NET upgrade assistant now being AI agent,....

VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.

by pjmlp

5/3/2026 at 3:00:06 AM

The entire selling point is "you no longer have to conform to standards in input to get usable output"; why would they conform to standards in output, or in process?

by zahlman

5/3/2026 at 6:11:48 PM

What use is a reputation if you don’t spend it now and then? If this lets Microsoft cut some divisional headcounts by 95%, certainly their enterprise customers are onboard with naked greed and don’t care about how it looks either — and us individuals aren’t relevant to MS, so why would maintaining our good perception of them matter at all?

by altairprime

5/2/2026 at 10:18:46 PM

Not that surprising when you consider the monumental investments. It's heinous but right in line with modern corporate business ethics.

by fuzzy_biscuit

5/3/2026 at 1:58:40 PM

I don't think anyone at Microsoft truly understands how much they have ruined their reputation. This won't be fixed again by open-sourcing a few tools. Fool me once, etc.

I will fight against any Microsoft tooling being used at every company until I die. This is unforgivable.

by jazzypants

5/2/2026 at 11:54:55 PM

Claude code not supporting specifying an alternate location to look for agent skills is another example.

by cjonas

5/3/2026 at 7:07:41 AM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation

Which literal 20+ year period was that?

by gib444

5/3/2026 at 1:12:05 AM

What did Command+G do in OSX? Online results are saying it "advances to the next search result after doing find". In other OS', that's just the enter key, if I am understanding the context correctly.

by registeredcorn

5/3/2026 at 1:17:08 AM

In MacOS it advances to the next search result _even if the search widget is not currently open_.

by rsynnott

5/5/2026 at 2:58:46 PM

Interesting! Thanks.

by registeredcorn

5/3/2026 at 1:11:13 AM

Sent from iPhone

by nelox

5/3/2026 at 4:18:45 PM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation

I hated with a passion when people claimed "MS loves open source now". I feel vindicated.

If a corporation can do a 180° turn in one direction, it can do a 180° turn in the other direction just as fast. They did not understand that, either because they didn't want to or because they weren't smart enough to understand how incentives shape behavior.

The incentives or a corporation are roughly making money for "shareholders"[0], making money for the C suite, making money for managers.

[0]: = People who do none of the actual work but have enough money to use it to get more money which therefore goes to them instead of the people doing actual work. (Intentionally saying "get" instead of "make" because they don't "make" anything.)

by martin-t

5/3/2026 at 2:54:29 AM

Wait, when did they rehabilitate their reputation? Before AI they were already shoving crap down our throats through windows 11.

by left-struck

5/3/2026 at 3:12:51 AM

Microsoft was making a big PR push to show everyone how they loved open source for a while.

by tardedmeme

5/3/2026 at 5:05:51 AM

This particular change feels... human driven.

by slashdave

5/3/2026 at 3:14:04 AM

What do you mean, there are many, perhaps too many, AI standards. MCP, SKILLS.md, A2A, two different ACPs, ECA.

by Ferret7446

5/3/2026 at 9:03:40 AM

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it

by redeeman

5/2/2026 at 9:32:25 PM

> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX

Have we been using the same Google?

by buzzerbetrayed

5/2/2026 at 9:58:03 PM

Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.

Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.

Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?

by dwedge

5/2/2026 at 10:15:49 PM

If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.

by phatfish

5/2/2026 at 10:23:12 PM

Chrome is a now-somewhat-archaic term for GUI (or specifically the actual elements of the GUI, not the concept), and Netscape/Mozilla did use the term a lot. Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).

by rsynnott

5/2/2026 at 11:44:08 PM

> Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars

FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.

Besides the use of chrome by Netscape/Mozilla that you mention, roughly around that time I heard it used by HCI people to refer flashy GUI design for cosmetics rather than function, and specifically to changes in a particular MacOS version.

I wonder whether Netscape/Mozilla jokingly then used it as a term for the GUI toolkit "trim" around the browser page. Given that this was a transition to the important stuff being on the Web page, rather than your computer. And/or whether Google did.

by neilv

5/3/2026 at 12:55:47 AM

> FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.

Mozilla named the web program Phoenix for rebirth. A company objected. Mozilla renamed it Firebird because phoenix was a fire bird. They named the mail program Thunderbird for similarity of Firebird.

by pseudalopex

5/3/2026 at 1:16:20 AM

Thanks, I forgot about Phoenix.

by neilv

5/3/2026 at 2:17:28 AM

Between Netscape Navigator and Firefox, their web browser was called simply "Mozilla". It supported GUI themes in XML with images which were officially called "Chrome". Mozilla also hosted user-contributed themes on a web site called "Chrome Zone".

The browser was considered slow and bloated however, and when Firefox came, its lack of theme support was perceived as part of it having been de-bloated.

by Findecanor

5/3/2026 at 11:55:14 AM

I might vaguely recall Mozilla being in an easter egg or alternate throbber in a Netscape browser, and my impression was that it had been an internal codename at Netscape which was then adopted for the open source project.

by neilv

5/3/2026 at 9:27:03 AM

> (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).

Not wanting to admit term was taken from competing browser is perfectly fine explanation

by PunchyHamster

5/3/2026 at 3:35:08 AM

Why is it archaic? It's part of the same metaphor as "engine", which is still widely used.

by isityettime

5/3/2026 at 12:55:06 PM

Because it's no longer widely used.

by rsynnott

5/3/2026 at 1:46:51 AM

This comment and a few others here make me feel old and sad for the people too young to remember that time. Yes, Google was an enormous breath of fresh air when it came out. 1000% better UI and features than the competition. Search was incredible. Gmail was a revelation. The whole company culture was night and day compared to the stodgy old tech companies like IBM. Just mind blowingly awesome. And then maps?? How did they even do that? The tech world felt entirely fresh and new and hopeful.

by krupan

5/3/2026 at 1:53:51 AM

They basically revolutionized the web with the JavaScript V8 engine in chrome. Before them, JavaScript performance was so bad you had to have a really light touch with it.

by parineum

5/3/2026 at 3:06:11 AM 

  > JavaScript performance was so bad you had to have a really light touch with it.
yep, but slowly the web is going back to js == slow imo, so many sites are so heavy its insane...

by andrekandre

5/3/2026 at 10:47:04 PM

The time I'm talking about was a long time before V8 and Chrome even

by krupan

5/3/2026 at 9:27:39 AM

I miss those times. It allowed for sooo many shitty practices

by PunchyHamster

5/2/2026 at 9:50:47 PM

We have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.

by HeavyStorm

5/2/2026 at 10:19:23 PM

Admittedly, it's a while ago. But original gmail, say, really did put a huge amount of effort into it.

by rsynnott

5/2/2026 at 9:35:31 PM

Some people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.

by frizlab

5/2/2026 at 11:46:47 PM

If you had been a Yahoo user when Google launched, you’d understand.

by ninjalanternshk

5/3/2026 at 9:20:22 AM

The pile of money they set on fire is still burning and they are desperate to get returns before it burns out

by PunchyHamster

5/2/2026 at 9:09:28 PM

[flagged]

by lpcvoid

5/2/2026 at 9:46:09 PM

5 years ago it was blockchain & NFT’s.

Same hypers just moved to different technology.

by grebc

5/2/2026 at 10:09:38 PM

In my circles it literally was the same people. Instead of trying to get me to buy ETH they started talking only via LLMs. Unsurprisingly we aren't in touch anymore... Maybe they are happier with their chatbots, I'll never know that's for sure

by 2ndorderthought

5/3/2026 at 12:29:25 AM

I'm intensely curious, since you know they're grifters, why are they in your circles? I guess maybe you don't mean circles the way I'm thinking and more the whims of algorithms?

by furyofantares

5/3/2026 at 12:45:31 AM

No I mean social circles

Because I am too nice and even though every conversation had an element of grift there was still a conversation. Most of them are lost, or struggling with their identity. Yes there's some greed but half of them just want to fit in somewhere and they aren't technical geniuses despite loving technology. I like people like that, of course with out the grift.

That said we don't keep in touch anymore. I do miss them though. I'm something like an abused dog that has seen too many things in their life to not look past all ugliness and see someone's inside. I hang around a lot of hurt people because í want them to have a safe person they can come to if they choose to heal.

Wow that's personal. I should stop posting here and go find some new friends.

by 2ndorderthought

5/3/2026 at 4:09:08 AM

Thanks for sharing.

by furyofantares

5/3/2026 at 1:10:04 AM

People get sucked into all sorts of schemes or ideas.

I never said grifters but a fair share of my social circle pumped crypto’s/nft’s when they bought some(small amounts but whatever).

Same people just can’t shut up about AI/LLM’s. I don’t care your LLM helped you generate an outlook email address export tool when a quick google reveals outlook can export the email address natively with just a few clicks.

by grebc

5/2/2026 at 9:57:43 PM

All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.

by PyWoody

5/2/2026 at 10:20:03 PM

> All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.

Some people made a lot of money off of those platforms. Everything was a nice story, but once you dug just a wee bit... smoke and mirrors.

by ExoticPearTree

5/2/2026 at 10:48:57 PM

There were definitely honest people trying to make a difference but they were unfortunately _vastly_ overshadowed by grifters.

by PyWoody

5/2/2026 at 9:58:57 PM

Yep, 25 years ago it was the web. And remember the great electricity grift 100 years ago. And horseless carriage grifters like Ford!

by thesmtsolver2

5/2/2026 at 11:24:51 PM

Yeah, you probably said web3 was going to change the web too.

by grebc

5/3/2026 at 1:21:39 AM

Don't stick your head in the sand just cause one fad didn't play out.

by hparadiz

5/3/2026 at 2:49:25 AM

I’m not, I’m presently underwhelmed by the examples everyone shows.

I’m yet to see actual productivity result from people paying to talk to chatbots to generate boilerplate.

But I tend to shy away from hypers so the LLM craze is passing me by. I have seen uses of AI/ML that helps recognise objects in images which I have seen it do OK at(and it should because it’s the same image just 10m down the road). A human then reviews the outputs. It also spits out highly inaccurate outputs fairly often that the human is necessary even with a feedback loop.

by grebc

5/2/2026 at 9:54:58 PM

See how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship.

I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh

by TeriyakiBomb

5/2/2026 at 10:00:35 PM

If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.

by OutOfHere

5/2/2026 at 10:21:40 PM

I said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth.

Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not.

These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.

by TeriyakiBomb

5/3/2026 at 3:16:42 AM

Those things you listed have lots of utility. Gambling is one of the most lucrative industries to be in.

by tardedmeme

5/3/2026 at 12:06:54 AM

That's very uncharitable. Crypto has been extremely useful for all sorts of grifters and enabled separating fools from their money at true web scale.

by c-cube

5/3/2026 at 2:02:40 AM

Indeed, it would be difficult for Iran to receive payment for passage through the straight or Hormuz without crypto or fir North Korea's ransomwwre economy to be so lucrative.

by cozzyd

5/5/2026 at 12:32:05 PM

You're speaking complete nonsense, considering there is no evidence of anyone having paid Iran in crypto. Iran had been receiving payments in the Chinese currency.

by OutOfHere

5/2/2026 at 10:26:25 PM

[flagged]

by OutOfHere

5/2/2026 at 10:37:50 PM

Ok. Well have fun. Bye.

by TeriyakiBomb

5/2/2026 at 10:57:33 PM

Who is investing in NFTs today?

Who is building their company using permission-less blockchain as the database? The average person still uses a bank checking account, not replacing it with a crypto account.

I haven’t heard of any progress on tokens in the Governance direction.

Stablecoins without a public audit trail have so far stayed relevant, but there are several which are suspiciously reminiscent of the mistakes that SBF made.

We all see the transfer of funds and the ostensible store of wealth when it comes to buying influence or presidential pardons. Those of us not wearing crypto-colored glasses don’t see the promise that VCs sold us on the industry 5-10 years ago.

by thephyber

5/2/2026 at 11:04:48 PM

I never spoke about NFTs nor do I have to speak about them, not today and not ever, so save your bait. It's in the same way that you didn't speak about bank bailouts, so I won't bait you into it.

Most people obviously use multiple accounts of different types. Those who have crypto wallets will never reveal them to you in the interest of their privacy.

Stablecoin firms make so much cash via interest that they're easily over-capitalized.

If you're foolish enough to be manipulated by VC interests, that's your own fault. I would focus on the tech, not on what VCs want you to believe. This applies generally, irrespective of the sector. I don't know why this is hard to understand.

by OutOfHere

5/3/2026 at 12:38:55 AM

NFTs are stupid. But I have a feeling as governments default on their debt and economies collapse in the next few decades cryptocurrencies will be of increasing importance.

by nothinkjustai

5/3/2026 at 1:42:53 AM

Cryptocurrencies are now useless, considering how openai and similar companies have enough compute to highjack them and the AI thing might not work out at all…

by LtWorf

5/4/2026 at 2:26:37 AM

(1) Capability is not the same as action. Every police officer in my city COULD murder me with their department issued gun at pretty much any time, but they haven’t. There are multiple reasons why, not the least of which is that _actions have consequences_. Worrying about that scenario is futile.

(2) The major cryptocurrencies aren’t as vulnerable to a malicious majority as you seem to think. All of the BTC ATMs, PoS providers, crypto exchanges, etc have strong incentive to ban malicious peers and they can do this soon after they identify the threat. The malicious majority would not be sufficient - they would also have to continually mine their own blocks faster than the rest of the network does.

(3) There would be a forked blockchain but only naive nodes which trust by default would continue with the illegitimate fork. Of the nodes who actually USE the cryptocurrency don’t agree with the malicious majority, it will be difficult to get the coins / tokens out of exchanges.

(4) The duration of any stolen nodes is the duration of the attack. Once the AI GPUs stop the attack and return to responding to LLM prompts, the legitimate blockchain returns to being the longest one, so all of the network returns to trusting the legitimate blockchain fork.

(5) The BTC network is controlled by a protocol agreed to by consensus. If the illegitimate blockchain fork stays longer than the legitimate one, the participants in the market can agree on a protocol change which hardcodes the illegitimate blockchain out of the picture (this happened with the ETH DAO in the early days after a successful double-spend attack).

by thephyber

5/3/2026 at 2:10:53 AM

I want the drugs you’re on :D

by nothinkjustai

5/3/2026 at 7:38:24 AM

Thanks for your deep and clearly thought out reply.

by LtWorf

5/3/2026 at 1:58:38 AM

That's 100% nonsense.

by OutOfHere

5/3/2026 at 7:39:09 AM

Thanks for putting the time to articulate why the AI GPUs cannot possibly be used to fork the blockchain and obtain the majority.

by LtWorf

5/3/2026 at 7:58:51 PM

Because they're needed to run AI. Newer hardware is increasingly specialized for AI too. Moreover, if funds start disappearing, the price will crash, negating the point.

by OutOfHere

5/4/2026 at 11:56:19 AM

They're raising the prices for AI, so demand will inevitably lower, freeing up capacity.

by LtWorf

5/4/2026 at 3:01:27 PM

You're speaking out of your a$$. AI demand is booming; it will keep booming ~10x more every year, so ~1000x more in three years.

If the prices are booming, it's to have a more sustainable pricing model.

by OutOfHere

5/5/2026 at 8:02:53 PM

> it will keep booming ~10x more every year, so ~1000x more in three years

LOL. That's some absurd interpolation.

by LtWorf

5/2/2026 at 9:20:03 PM

The best part is that copilot commented on the PR saying that this doesn’t actually change the behaviour, creates inconsistency in the codebase and suggested reverting the change! (This comment seems to have been ignored…)

> The configuration schema default was changed to "all", but the runtime fallback in extensions/git/src/repository.ts still calls config.get('addAICoAuthor', 'off'). This is now out of sync and can lead to unexpected behavior in contexts where the contributed configuration defaults aren't loaded (e.g., some tests/hosts), and it makes the intended default unclear. Update the runtime fallback to match the schema default (or omit the fallback so the contributed default is used).

by ddkto

5/2/2026 at 10:36:54 PM

I also liked the bot posting screenshot diffs that are all false positives, while apparently not capturing the default change (is it not in some menu somewhere?)

by stefan_

5/2/2026 at 9:53:10 PM

That's pretty standard review practice in there by now.

by HeavyStorm

5/3/2026 at 1:42:33 AM

But it was apparently ignored.

by jagged-chisel

5/3/2026 at 2:24:16 AM

It wasn’t ignored, the second commit fixes what the bot suggested

by dlopes7

5/3/2026 at 4:32:10 AM

There are two commits in the PR, the second of the two seems to update the fallback config to avoid the inconsistency that Copilot was complaining about.

by brendoelfrendo

5/3/2026 at 12:57:50 PM

Constructive feedback: revert it and then apologise instead of just doing half of it.

by aduwah

5/2/2026 at 9:36:37 PM

This feels like the modern version of 'Sent from my iPhone' but much more invasive. Git commits are legal and technical records. Falsifying who authored a piece of code just to pump up AI usage stats is a huge breach of trust and it is disappointing to see Microsoft prioritize branding over the integrity of the developer's log. I expect my IDE to record what happened, not what the marketing department wants people to think happened.....

by yankohr

5/2/2026 at 10:09:22 PM

Absolutely, messing with commits is more invasive than messages. It gets worse:

"Sent from my iPhone" appears in the authoring view, and you can delete it.

Co-authored-by: NEVER appears in the commit message UI - it is added without the user even seeing it.

by tln

5/3/2026 at 8:25:30 AM

My Claude Code just puts it in the commit which anyone can read before pushing. Is that not the case here?

by apexalpha

5/3/2026 at 8:57:16 AM

I don't use git features in vscode, but from what I understand the user clicked some button to make a commit, typed in a commit message, and then hit "OK" and the editor called `git commit ...` in the background... after silently adding "Co-Authored by Microsoft Copilot" to the commit message.

That's a little different than Claude doing the commits all by itself and happening to include an attribution line. Especially since, as it turns out, this was being done on clients that had all the AI stuff turned off. But even if that weren't the case, it'd still be wrong.

Also you shouldn't be using Claude that way...

by adastra22

5/3/2026 at 12:08:03 PM

Nothing wrong at all with separating out Claude’s work with commits! In fact, it’s preferable IMO — it lets people browsing the history identify code that was primarily written by AI.

by bbor

5/3/2026 at 12:15:22 PM

But it actually doesn't.

This is not just a hypothetical but a non-common workflow: I already wrote upstaged code change myself. I ask claude to review it, and if ok, commit and push.

At no point did claude author any of it, just a review. So a co-author statement is false.

by wallst07

5/3/2026 at 12:12:49 PM

It's technically the same thing because a pre-commit hook can easily remove it.

I did this with the very first versions of claude which didn't have a documented setting to turn it off, and kept it every since. It works with every single coding tool because it just looks for the same key word.

by wallst07

5/3/2026 at 1:57:05 PM

Anthropic documents how to turn it off, though, and shows you in the commit message preview

by slenk

5/3/2026 at 4:17:50 AM

I think it's kinda cute that you don't see it as an attempt to steal code by claiming they "co-authored" it. How long before they claim they can use any code co-authored by Copilot in training? How long before you see your own code, "co-authored by Copilot" as an output in a commercial product that YOU aren't making a profit from? Just a thought :)

by Henchman21

5/3/2026 at 12:22:37 AM

And also those early Spotify days where Spotify would automatically post what you’re listening to to your Facebook wall.

I’ve always seen that practice of using the user as your recommendation lever without their consent as unethical.

by Esophagus4

5/3/2026 at 1:18:40 PM

Those services always asked ahead of time though. And at the time, it was seen as cool, like a not-so-subtle "look at me, listening to music on this cool service".

by delecti

5/3/2026 at 8:34:36 AM

My suspicion is that it violates the users copyright on their commit message.

by heisenbit

5/3/2026 at 10:57:50 AM

Technically (in the US at least) purely AI-generated content has no copyright, hence any copyright associated with the commit can only assigned to the human authors (or the entity they are working for). As I understand it neither Copilot nor Microsoft should have any actual claim of authorship (from a copyright/IP perspective).

It's still quite problematic IMO

by rodw

5/3/2026 at 3:30:31 PM

It is designed to undermine any future disputes regarding IP and their "AI" being trained on our mind products.

by yubblegum

5/3/2026 at 11:31:35 AM

I've never heard of git commits being used in a legal case, do you have any examples?

by Pay08

5/3/2026 at 1:49:04 PM

I don't know if it's been tested in court, but that's the rationale behind the Signed-off-by lines the kernel requires in all patches sent. It's a way to tell the (legal) ownership of a piece of code.

by tuetuopay

5/7/2026 at 6:23:04 AM

I’ve had to talk to company lawyers about specific commits. Case was settled afaik

by alxndr

5/3/2026 at 8:30:47 AM

That makes the bite less damaging - if everyone hax "Co-authored-by AI" in their commits less shame for it, just a normal fact of life now, not a sign of low quality.

by visarga

5/3/2026 at 10:36:56 AM

It's either neutral useless information, or a sign of low quality. It's never positive.

Its a sign that the developer didn't pay attention to what they committed. Like a spelling error, or forgetting to run the linter.

If the IDE added "written with vscode" i would be equally furious.

by aDyslecticCrow

5/3/2026 at 11:35:27 AM

According to the link, the message changing isn't visible to the user in any way (besides running a git log after the fact).

by Pay08

5/2/2026 at 10:02:20 PM

Good point. That fake commit addendum means that the entire commit contents would not be under copyright protection. AI generated code is not currently copyrightable.

by polski-g

5/2/2026 at 10:04:54 PM

Not that simple… this is great read: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-w...

by bdangubic

5/3/2026 at 3:00:49 AM

Still if you're the lawyer on the side of the lawsuit claiming that the code is copyrightable, you really don't want that copilot attribution in the commit message muddying the waters.

by bjt

5/3/2026 at 2:58:04 PM

you actually do, as counter-intuitive as that seems. co-authored implies (and gives you room to argue) that you were involved in the process. hiding the fact that you did if proven otherwise (not that hard to prove in many cases if it comes to that) won’t be looking good. at my work, we are mandated to include AI attribution and I would say every well-run company should have same mandate

by bdangubic

5/2/2026 at 10:35:19 PM

It doesn't mean that. A Co-Authored-By header isn't a legal signature or legal assertion of AI generated code.

by jiveturkey

5/2/2026 at 10:51:38 PM

It’s certainly an assertion.

by VanTheBrand

5/2/2026 at 10:07:39 PM

Is thos actually decided yet? Closest thing was the image generation cases. What's your go to source for this?

by whattheheckheck

5/3/2026 at 12:49:27 AM

Outside this instance, how can one prove code was AI generated beyond a reasonable doubt? Also, do you (or anyone else) know how much AI/copied-code has to be modified for it to be considered independent?

If AI generates code, and one just renames some variables/method signatures, then what?

by hirvi74

5/3/2026 at 1:31:26 AM

> how can one prove code was AI generated beyond a reasonable doubt?

Subpoena the provider they use.

Even if they don’t retain the full context, they have to save API calls for billing and analytics. If you’re clauding for the hour up to and after the commit, one can reasonably assume you built it with (if not exclusively by) AI.

by tyre

5/3/2026 at 11:16:46 AM

> If you’re clauding for the hour up to and after the commit, one can reasonably assume you built it with (if not exclusively by) AI.

That's not beyond a reasonable doubt.

by skinfaxi

5/3/2026 at 4:41:40 PM

Reasonable doubt is required in criminal cases,most disputes about whether AI or human wrote code will be civil cases.

by graemep

5/2/2026 at 10:09:21 PM

One could argue that Co-Authored by Copilot means 'not under copyright'

by Gibbon1

5/2/2026 at 11:21:03 PM

The headline literally says the line is being inserted regardless of usage, which makes it easy to argue that it’s entirely meaningless as an indicator of AI use at all.

by Aurornis

5/2/2026 at 11:56:58 PM

If you can get AI to write your slop is it really socially valuable enough to justify copyright?

Even before AI copyrighting software was questionable.

by Gibbon1

5/3/2026 at 10:04:27 AM

The point they're making is that this happens even in code where AI didn't write it. One of the comments on the page is from someone mentioning they have all Copilot and AI features turned off, and it still added this to their commits. You can't conclude anything about whether AI could write it from the presence of this in a commit message.

by saghm

5/3/2026 at 11:22:03 AM

One would be completely wrong.

AI is a tool that may make copyright violations more likely, but whether the output violates copyright is a property of the output, not how it was produced.

If you copy and paste leaked closed source code or if your AI produces it verbatim, you're in trouble either way. Change it up a bit and you're fine in practice in both cases.

by kaashif

5/2/2026 at 10:54:05 PM

Yeah the current guidance from US copyright office is that if it were said to be solely authored by copilot it would not be eligible for copyright. If it were said to be solely authored by human A (who happened to use co-pilot) the elements and arrangement of it not generated by co-pilot would be copyrightable. I’m not sure the copyright office has released guidance on attempting to register AI as a co-author I assume the registration would be rejected but you’d be able to re-submit as sole Human author.

by VanTheBrand

5/3/2026 at 4:50:59 PM

The Thaler case settled part of that: an LLM cannot be an author.

The guidance says its case by and case I can find no indication separation of elements is critical. Its more how closely you guide and correct the AI https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

You can go by US guidance if you only distribute the work in the US. Otherwise you need to he aware this varies elsewhere.

by graemep

5/2/2026 at 9:45:02 PM

FYI, they changed the default of 'git.addAICoAuthor' to 'chatAndAgent' afterwards: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880

So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'

by MaKey

5/2/2026 at 11:25:56 PM

Changed back or not, this demonstrates that they're either willing to make sweeping changes like this that hurt a massive number of users, or that they're incompetent to the point of not realising the impact of the first change. They'd have had to just blindly make the change, since the original PR was approved and merged within the same minute by the original author (no additional eyes, at least that we can see), or ignore user complaints and make it anyway. Both cases demonstrate terrible stewardship of VSCode.

by nusl

5/2/2026 at 11:00:11 PM

This should be higher, as this dates from 5 days ago I wonder why OP didn't bother to mention this follow-up

by dbeley

5/3/2026 at 2:48:30 AM

To be fair to OP, that follow-up doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere in the discussion on #310226, either. They probably should have left a note about that change before locking the thread.

by kllrnohj

5/2/2026 at 11:38:00 PM

To be honest, I didn't see the follow up. It just incensed me enough that they would do that to begin with.

Right up there with Zed being pretty open that they siphon your code through their API surface and have a "Just Trust Us Bro" data retention policy, along with no way to turn the collaboration features off.

- OP

by indrora

5/3/2026 at 6:18:02 PM

What's this about Zed? I've been considering switching to it but I want to know more about what you mentioned.

by kevinmgranger

5/2/2026 at 8:51:14 PM

"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.

by SwellJoe

5/2/2026 at 9:07:53 PM

That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver.

This kind of tagline marketing works best with people people who aren't even aware that they're participating, and who aren't bothered to do anything different it even if they become aware.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so the marketing remains.

  Sent from my iPhone
  Downloaded from Demonoid
  Rusty n Edie's: The world's friendliest BBS 216-726-0737

by ssl-3

5/2/2026 at 9:25:40 PM

But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.

by SwellJoe

5/2/2026 at 9:37:56 PM

I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.

But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.

by ssl-3

5/3/2026 at 3:21:23 AM

There's no such thing as bad publicity. If people who didn't know about your product become angry about your product, they're more likely to buy it.

by tardedmeme

5/2/2026 at 9:59:09 PM

100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.

I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors

by TeriyakiBomb

5/2/2026 at 9:17:17 PM

Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.

by SwellJoe

5/2/2026 at 9:32:57 PM

It's the masochism of downloading images at 2400 baud.

by projektfu

5/3/2026 at 12:55:51 AM

Huh. I always thought the point of "Sent from my iPhone" (or the earlier "Sent from my Blackberry") was that it indicated "I don't have access to my desktop and file server right now so don't expect me to send that file".

by bandrami

5/3/2026 at 1:29:14 AM

I once was involved with booking the actor Kal Penn for an event and his signature line was "Sent from your mom's house". I always loved that.

by bandrami

5/2/2026 at 8:59:10 PM

However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.

by djyde

5/2/2026 at 9:09:45 PM

Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.

by blaze33

5/2/2026 at 9:37:53 PM

100% hundreds of people do.

by conception

5/2/2026 at 9:45:55 PM

Doubly so, because you are being used as ad-channel and not being compensated for it either.

by manquer

5/2/2026 at 9:13:13 PM

Microsoft already does this with their mobile Outlook. Sent by Outlook Android / iOS on the bottom of the message.

by k8sToGo

5/2/2026 at 9:44:24 PM

Huge difference: the commit signature may not have had anything to do with Copilot, whereas email sent by mobile Outlook was... sent by Outlook.

by chrisweekly

5/3/2026 at 10:28:41 AM

Nah, they are both unacceptable spam. Don't put words in my mouth and don't hijack my communication for marketing.

by kevincox

5/3/2026 at 1:35:18 PM

I was just pointing out there's a difference, not endorsing any of it.

by chrisweekly

5/2/2026 at 9:36:08 PM

But you can see it and remove it before sending. It’s definitely not the same.

by frizlab

5/2/2026 at 10:08:23 PM

Sometimes it randomly pushes without me asking, so I have a mess to clean up.

by nsxwolf

5/3/2026 at 12:31:13 AM

I don't really send emails anymore but when I actually used email to keep in touch with friends (during the interesting bit of time between smart phones becoming mainstream and SMS and other messaging services becoming more popular than email), I changed my signature to be "Sent from your iPhone" even though I used an android and mainly sent emails from my computer, just to be an edgy teenager. Got some interesting responses from that.

It's interesting to see how communication, digital and otherwise, has evolved over time.

by abustamam

5/2/2026 at 9:11:45 PM

Does anybody else remember Tapatalk? They did the same with signatures in forums.

by sunaookami

5/2/2026 at 9:45:01 PM

"sent from my iphone" originally meant more than just "i have a fancy phone that lets me send email" in the early days it meant "I'm not at my desk right now."

by sleepybrett

5/2/2026 at 9:11:41 PM

This is pumping someone's metrics up inside of Microsoft, somewhere.

The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?

by mister_mort

5/2/2026 at 10:05:45 PM

A Principal Software Engineer at Microslop merged this - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitriy-vasyura-9191611/

This is the author of the MR - https://github.com/cwebster-99 - A Product Manager at Microslop

I've routinely spoken on the uselessness, and oftentimes detriment of product managers in tech.

The dearth of leadership driving for vanity metrics like PMs writing code doesn't help either.

by 650

5/3/2026 at 12:09:59 AM

I'm here in case you have something to say to me directly.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 3:48:00 PM

Why did a PM create the merge request? It seems like internal testing brought up issues, why was it merged regardless? Is velocity a metric you were aiming for when merging this?

by 650

5/3/2026 at 12:41:35 AM

What was the reasoning for this change?

by unchar1

5/3/2026 at 6:56:24 AM

There are customers who would like to see attribution on changes where AI contributed (companies, users, etc). True, that's not everyone, but you can query our repo for the issues for which this feature was implemented.

The rationale I suppose is those customers what to be more careful with code that was contributed by AI.

HTH

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 11:45:17 AM

I don't see how this would actually help. If people don't want to disclose they used AI they will just strip the message from the commit.

Maybe those customers should just be more selective with the people they allow to contribute to their project?

Also, this kind of message doesn't even bring valuable info: it doesn't explain how the AI was used (could be 99% vibe-coding, or just a quick "Please review current changes" + minor fixes at the end?), which model was used, etc. Like other commenters here I can't see this as anything else than a marketing push for Copilot.

Don't take it personally though, you are probably not the one that should be taking the heat since the change was directly pushed by your product manager.

by Lyrkan

5/3/2026 at 12:46:56 AM

[flagged]

by voganmother42

5/3/2026 at 6:26:40 PM

Please don't be personally aggressive in HN comments, regardless of how provoked you are or feel you are. We're trying for something different here, and we particularly want to avoid pile-on, shaming, and mob dynamics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by dang

5/3/2026 at 12:56:13 AM

Thanks. I guess...

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 4:09:40 PM

[flagged]

by wswope

5/3/2026 at 6:27:31 PM

This is seriously not ok on HN. You can't attack others like this, regardless of how justified you are or feel you are, and we ban accounts that do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately done this before (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47548889). I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the site rules and not do anything like this again on HN, we'd appreciate it.

by dang

5/3/2026 at 9:26:12 PM

Fair play; I got too personal here. Apologies.

by wswope

5/4/2026 at 5:21:57 AM

Appreciated.

by dang

5/2/2026 at 11:11:03 PM

I can’t access that LinkedIn link without going through their Persona ID process, which requires all kinds of PII.

> LinkedIn users attempting identity verification may be unknowingly handing sensitive personal data to Persona Identities Inc., a company that distributes information to government agencies, credit bureaus, utilities, and mobile providers.

^ Link from a LinkedIn page I found on a Kagi search.

I can view some LinkedIn pages but not others without logging in.

Even though I’ve never posted to LinkedIn it only use it as a public résumé, my account was flagged as needing identity verification. I’m pretty sure this happened a year or two ago when I changed my email address from one domain I owned to another domain I owned.

I’ve never been able to log in since then, and there is no support path. The only available way past it is to simply submit all the info to Persona.

by ArmadilloGang

5/3/2026 at 12:10:32 AM

I'm here, what would you like to know?

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 12:43:47 AM

Why did you lock the comments on the GitHub issue?

(Edit: I meant to say PR, not issue...)

by bsuvc

5/3/2026 at 12:55:29 AM

I didn't. I have locked the comments on a closed PR, and many of those comments were not constructive.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 1:46:29 AM

I'm not him, but it was pretty obvious that the comments section was going to be attracting more and more people saying the same thing that had already been said before, and that no useful discussion was going to be had. At some point the value of spamming everyone who commented on the issue with a notification (which puts an email in your inbox if you haven't changed the default setting) becomes lower and lower.

I've seen that before on other issue comment threads. The repo owner says "Hey everyone, if you want an issue fixed, please upvote the issue with a thumbs up". And many people don't read that, and instead post "Please fix this" comments without giving a thumbs-up to the issue. So, 1) the repo owner doesn't get to use the "sort issues by # of thumbs-up reactions" to see the priority of that issue, and 2) everyone who has subscribed to the issue gets spammed with a message that's useless to them.

Since nearly all the new comments had become "me too"-style comments, which should have just been a thumbs-up on a previous comment in order to reduce spam, I feel like locking the issue thread was the right move at that point, to stop people from receiving yet more unnecessary email in their already-overflowing inboxes.

by rmunn

5/3/2026 at 9:37:05 AM

Thank you so much for explaining the exact reason I did it!

I am reading all pings from GitHub on VS Code and this was just turning into a stream of spam that wasn't adding much new information.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 7:25:13 PM

Why does it say "microsoft" locked the thread?

by throw_await

5/4/2026 at 12:24:14 AM

Because the `microsoft` group account is the owner of the repo. With group accounts, you can designate many individuals to have admin access to the repo, but the actions taken by those admins will be attributed to the group account that owns the repo. (Because presumably the rest of the admins agree with the action taken, otherwise they would undo/revert it).

by rmunn

5/7/2026 at 6:32:51 AM

Thank you

by throw_await

5/3/2026 at 4:08:50 PM

This is what happens when nontechnical people land production code in order to game their promotion metrics.

I sense the PM in question is disconnected from the sensibilities of the users she ostensibly represents. Looking at her record I see she never worked as a programmer. But with four years in her current position she ought to have figured this much out. Strong AI incentives perhaps?

by esafak

5/2/2026 at 10:20:15 PM

The role feels like it’s borne out of a desire to see employees as fungible.

by gopher_space

5/2/2026 at 9:32:11 PM

Isn't that someone the person who created the PR? "Product Manager at @microsoft working on VS Code and GitHub Copilot!" it says on her profile

by k8sToGo

5/2/2026 at 9:46:31 PM

Isn't it also cause they want to tag those commit so that they don't feed it into copilot training?

by whynotmaybe

5/2/2026 at 11:59:51 PM

My first thought when I read this was that it was accidental. But the title of the PR looks like that they aren't even trying to hide it

by harambee4ever

5/3/2026 at 8:07:37 AM

Never attribute malice as mistakes when it comes to Microsoft.

by 7734128

5/2/2026 at 9:29:03 PM

That someone saw Google's claim that 75% of their code is written with AI and said "hold my beer".

Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

by telchior

5/2/2026 at 9:44:25 PM

>No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s

by liquid_thyme

5/2/2026 at 9:09:07 PM

Isn’t this a kind of “leopards ate my face” situation? I thought we had all “agreed” that letting AI write code and take control of software repositories is good, even if we have no idea what is going on beyond a thin surface layer, because well it’s fast and we can fix it later and lol who needs testing? My customers are my testers.

And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?

by low_tech_love

5/2/2026 at 10:15:52 PM

The sneaky commit modification is triggered by very modest usage of AI such as auto-completion.

Look, if an agent writes the code and the commit message then adding a Co-authored-by by default is ok. Not even showing it before the commit is made is not, and adding the message when AI was just completing code is not.

by tln

5/2/2026 at 10:39:21 PM

I genuinely think it's not ok even then. Copilot is a tool, one of many I use. That tool has no business polluting commit messages without my knowledge.

The appended message isn't even adding any new information, as in this day and age a vast majority of commits is probably "co-authored" by an LLM.

by bojan

5/2/2026 at 10:54:40 PM

I should have been clearer, the hidden addition is never ok.

If I ask Claude to write a commit message, it will inserted a co-author line (and an ad), but I can see it and disapprove, add a counter instruction to CLAUDE.md etc

by tln

5/3/2026 at 6:45:19 AM

I personally don’t understand the need to treat a tool as an “author” but that’s not important, my comment is mostly regarding the backlash of what happened. A feature was rushed in and does not work as intended, in a kind of disastrous way. Now we feel like our customers do when they have to deal with all the crap that our AI co-authors push forward without the right process.

by low_tech_love

5/2/2026 at 10:24:02 PM

Glorified autocomplete, syntax reminder and random snippet generator thinks it's co-authoring things.

by AlienRobot

5/3/2026 at 5:58:42 AM

This is bad. I need to start Monday warning my team about this and installing validation hooks in our repos that catch any commits with this. We don't have a non-AI policy, but we have an "approved AI" policy due to data security, and having all your commits say "Co-Authored-by Copilot" is more or less the same as as "I ** on infosec". We also have a "short commits message" policy, and that "Co-Authored" thingy takes characters.

by dsign

5/3/2026 at 11:04:18 AM

short commit messages, but you would usually allow details in the details part of the commit message, right? Which is where this goes?

by lionkor

5/2/2026 at 8:49:31 PM

Next it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza

by mrcartmeneses

5/2/2026 at 9:27:10 PM

Next Microsoft will sue you to get a share of revenues and ownership as co-author, if your product ever makes success.

by Qem

5/2/2026 at 9:14:32 PM

But only if you watched this 1 min Segment of today's sponsor...

Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer

by k8sToGo

5/4/2026 at 2:35:54 PM

Please verify that you are pushing to branch 'master' by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!"

ERROR! Merge conflict. Please drink a verification can.

by yuye

5/2/2026 at 9:19:56 PM

This will be so true hahaha

by IdontKnowRust

5/2/2026 at 8:58:07 PM

More like Carl's Jr.: Fuck you! We're eating.

by dessimus

5/2/2026 at 9:09:35 PM

Microsoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.

by amarant

5/2/2026 at 9:29:48 PM

I know you didn’t mean it that way, but boy did that make me feel old.

Anyone else remember the bill gates borg category on slashdot?

by dd8601fn

5/2/2026 at 9:37:10 PM

Indeed fellow traveller. I do.

by willhslade

5/2/2026 at 10:03:51 PM

There is more of it that's going on. For me, Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard app sabotages the use of a competing search engine (DuckDuckGo) in Firefox in Android for me. When typing a multi-word double-quoted search phrase, it doesn't allow it to be typed correctly.

by OutOfHere

5/3/2026 at 3:24:31 AM

DuckDuckGo is not a competitor to Bing. It is a sub-brand of Bing for the purpose of market segmentation. While Bing attracts users who install Windows and click on internet, DuckDuckGo attracts users who feel concerned about privacy. It's the same engine under the hood.

by tardedmeme

5/3/2026 at 7:57:15 PM

Last I read, Microsoft pays DuckDuckGo somewhat proportional to its user count.

by OutOfHere

5/3/2026 at 12:28:40 AM

This is especially hostile to users given that courts are ruling that AI written code can’t be copyrighted.

When Hotmail inserted “sent using Hotmail” in emails as a growth hack it didn’t have legal consequences. This might.

by digitaltrees

5/2/2026 at 9:23:03 PM

Jeez, you can see many things wrong with this new all-in AI direction that Microsoft is taking. Commit by a product manager, who probably actually never digged through the code before…automated ai review not catching the problem, and the vibe codes pr introduction the error itself

by MkLouis

5/2/2026 at 10:07:28 PM

This was merged by a Principal SWE though. Maybe overruled by leadership :)

by 650

5/2/2026 at 11:57:56 PM 

    microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes ago

by lagniappe

5/3/2026 at 12:07:57 AM

Many such cases.

by weberer

5/3/2026 at 1:06:45 AM

The PR author didn't even bother to properly capitalize their subject and add a description. What a double standard for code quality Macroslop is applying to internal vs. external contributions.

by csmantle

5/2/2026 at 9:06:13 PM

My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.

by cozzyd

5/3/2026 at 12:44:11 AM

640k … there is something poetic about that number.

by signa11

5/3/2026 at 2:07:09 AM

I figure that's how much RAM I can expend for Microsoft products.

by cozzyd

5/2/2026 at 10:22:45 PM

Can you explain how this works? Doesn’t this also stop you from connecting to it over ssh via vs code?

by c0wb0yc0d3r

5/3/2026 at 12:24:42 AM

Yes that's the point. If vscode didn't insist on installing potentially gigabytes of blobs then this wouldn't be necessary.

(I'm a vimmer anyway... And emacs is too bloated to fit too, conveniently.)

by cozzyd

5/3/2026 at 3:34:49 AM

> And emacs is too bloated to fit too, conveniently.

If you connect via ssh, you could use Tramp. It does not install emacs on the target, but instead use a somewhat permanent connection as a tunnel for most emacs commands (transparently). Works too with docker, podman, distrobox, etc,...

by skydhash

5/3/2026 at 5:14:44 AM

yep, it's a shame vscode doesn't do something similar and instead copies a huge runtime (evidently, multiple times?!?) onto unsuspecting hosts.

by cozzyd

5/2/2026 at 11:56:28 PM

Sounds like a feature.

by accelbred

5/3/2026 at 1:14:44 AM

Even large companies like Anthropic and Microsoft keep pushing out features without proper code and/or product review. This has become a bottleneck in software engineering.

by docheinestages

5/3/2026 at 3:23:04 AM

its a sad truth, but in the end, for companies, software is just a means to an end: more revenue

and if they can get more revenue by less quality and cutting corners they will do it; see countless examples of such scandals in many industries...

by andrekandre

5/3/2026 at 1:54:39 AM

Wow. Just like using ungoogled-chromium instead of chrome, lineage os instead of oem android, using vscodium instead of vscode is again justified. These decisions really are the ones that I'll never regret.

In addition, using the word microslop instead of microsoft is again justified, too.

by RandyOrion

5/2/2026 at 9:13:16 PM

Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.

by stodor89

5/2/2026 at 9:14:51 PM

Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.

by sedatk

5/2/2026 at 9:18:21 PM

To be precise,

"git.addAICoAuthor": "off"

by snehesht

5/3/2026 at 12:48:20 AM

Until they change it to „CoauthorAI” in next version. This shouldn’t be a default in the first place

by mgol94

5/2/2026 at 9:02:46 PM

Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.

by throwaway81523

5/3/2026 at 8:15:59 AM

Interestingly a product manager creates a PR with small but sort of policy change without any backstory/explanation, it gets reviewed by a single developer and merged without a single comment. The bar to make changes to a production software used by so many people has gown down considerably.

by sandeepkd

5/3/2026 at 12:03:49 AM

Does anyone happen to know, what, if any, are the ownership/copyright/intellectual property liabilities and/or rights that come from a `co-authored by copilot/claude/codex/whatever`

Right now these companies are dealing with legal troubles from taking other's code/IP without honoring the license or copyright.

My theory that could be a bit of stretch is; if they can eventually replace all that copyright'd code that is trained into these models with versions their agent services created during the millions of uses daily, they can train future versions on code they wrote. If they hold any ownership stake or usage rights on that code, due to those co-authored lines, which are saying "this agent and by extension the company that owns it was a part of creating this code", they effectively will have laundered the license away from the original owners and removed any way to pursue legal action because they won't even be using the stuff stolen anymore, and worse yet, if they now have their own copyright or other legal grounds due to their agents co-authoring all new code, they could start going after smaller ai companies for the same thing individuals were going after them for.

I know that's a pessimistic outlook, but I feel like the co-authored lines are being placed there for more than marketing exposure. It's a commit message after all, how much could that help marketing. It's the ownership/author attribution aspect that concerns me.

by wutwutwat

5/3/2026 at 1:38:01 AM

I miss in this whole thread why this is happening. Presumably to be transparent whether code has been co-written by AI?

What's in it for Microsoft?

If we accept that AI can't copyright or own IP rights on something, then why? I have a sneaky suspicion that there's some lobbying in the works to overturn that ruling going forward. In the past, it was OK to build models from copyrighted data etc one might have found on the wayside. But, in the future, no such thing for you. Everything generated by the AIs will then belong (at least partly) to the megacorps (maybe THEY can co-own the copyright if the AI cannot). Nice pulling-up-the ladder if true.

This could also be a move against other countries' IP position.

I've seen the explanation from dimitriv [1], but I am not convinced. These markings achieve very little, as people can clearly work around it by copy-pasting code from another place, or using other companies tools, like claude code or antigravity (or, not even use the GUI)

I suppose the answer might just be "don't attribute to malice ...", even if Microsoft has proven us wrong before; they generally know exactly what they are doing strategically.

I guess, in a few years we will know.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmitriv#47991835

by golem14

5/3/2026 at 7:57:09 AM

The change was about helping teams ensure AI-generated code is attributed in commits - nothing to do with copyrights and the like. If you don't have to take my word for it - query VS Code repo for changes and issues that went into implementing this and you will see.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 8:23:34 AM

Thanks for jumping in the conversation. Logically it does makes sense to attribute the authors correctly, however in this context it might be helpful if you can provide any details about the users complaining that their PR's are being marked as co-authored even when they have not used the copilot? Is that intentional or a missed check in the implementation.

Also for layman readers like me who might not be actively involved, it might have been helpful to add the issue/referenced conversation why this change was made on the PR itself

by sandeepkd

5/3/2026 at 9:42:43 AM

The fact that non-AI changes are attributed to Copilot is a bug. The intent was to allow customers to add attribution of AI-generated code. As with any bug, it was not intetional.

by dmitriv

5/3/2026 at 1:17:10 PM

you intentionally ignored internal reports of if not working

by voganmother42

5/4/2026 at 5:59:50 AM

>The fact that non-AI changes are attributed to Copilot is a bug.

But sneaking in the attribution to Copilot without approval was the feature?

by fastasucan

5/3/2026 at 9:09:22 PM

It would be easier to rationalize it if there were an assurance that AI-generated code would be generally credited with the model used. But as I understand it, this credit only happens when using the co-pilot GUI, right? No credit for copy paste code from uncertain pedigree? So I think it makes sense to question the logic here.

Would be possible to admit a brain fart and roll the change back?

by golem14

5/3/2026 at 2:52:04 AM

Most odd things can be explained by imagining who might be able to buy a new boat as a result.

by dboreham

5/3/2026 at 3:42:41 AM

Yeah, that's what I'm saying, too. I'm just not sure how to connect the dots here.

by golem14

5/3/2026 at 7:13:25 AM

I'm so glad I switched to NeoVim. I've got the good LSP and auto-complete stuff, a nicer grepping experience, semantic moving and selecting with treesitter textobjects, and absolutely ZERO LLM AI stuff. (I still use LLMs outside my editor for some searching and questions, but may try to cut that down too.)

Call me a Luddite, but we are up against something extra insidious with this new AI wave, and the cracks of the psychosis are starting to show.

by adamddev1

5/2/2026 at 9:39:37 PM

At no point in time companies were so desperate for developer attention. It feels like the general consensus is it is a “winner takes it all” race, and everyone has to add as many dark patterns as possible to increase stickiness.

by tokioyoyo

5/3/2026 at 12:59:30 AM

I have been in this situation. A major driving force is some kind of a demand from the leadership to see the KPI for the AI adoption. And this unfortunately is the easiest one to implement.

The other aspect is virality. I think by now the implementing team should know that most people do not appreciate Claud inserting itself into the commit message. It's the job of the team to feed that to the leadership.

by bg24

5/2/2026 at 9:24:39 PM

Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.

by rwaksmunski

5/3/2026 at 12:22:46 AM

And here I’m thinking that my text editor should have zero interaction with anything git other than as a diff viewer.

lazygit is text editor agnostic and works brilliantly to give some near perfect porcelain to git specifically. And it works the same with Ghostty, Terminal, zed, VS Code, any environment I happen to be in, while saving so many keystrokes.

by quink

5/2/2026 at 9:06:08 PM

This is really bad.

by b4rtaz__

5/2/2026 at 9:10:55 PM

Should be the top comment for succintly summarizing the situation.

by glitchc

5/3/2026 at 1:22:52 AM

If your code is "co-authored by Copilot", does that then allow future AI to train on it without your consent?

by bsuvc

5/2/2026 at 8:56:52 PM

Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.

by holistio

5/2/2026 at 9:09:28 PM

That happens in most speech to text systems, even Superwhisper, Monologue and Wispr Flow. I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio and happens when there is silence. I guess it depends on the model but most of them are based on Whisper which has this problem

by yNeolh

5/2/2026 at 9:32:17 PM

> I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio

Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"

by zugi

5/2/2026 at 9:59:49 PM

"Smash that Like button."

by ikidd

5/2/2026 at 10:16:51 PM

Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.

by mr-wendel

5/2/2026 at 10:05:21 PM

Having to scroll through 3 screens worth of giant automated comments on the linked PR before seeing any comments written by humans is the cherry on top.

So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.

by bakugo

5/2/2026 at 9:38:55 PM

Time to leave for something else if you haven't already, vscode has been good to us but this kind of behavior is only going to ramp up as Microsoft seeks to get a return on their AI investments.

by ryan-a

5/3/2026 at 12:13:10 AM

Zed is looking pretty good right now

by Brainspackle

5/3/2026 at 12:27:37 AM

Seems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back

by guluarte

5/2/2026 at 11:18:37 PM

I've been hesitant to use Zed mostly because I didn't want to learn new key but last week, I finally jumped in and remapped to keys that I like. It works really well.

by fhn

5/2/2026 at 11:42:40 PM

FYI you should read Zed's FAQ on data retention.

It's very "Trust Me Bro". My workplace has already banned Zed after legal review purely on the lack of any controls over the collaboration feature that gets turned on the instant that you log into Github with it.

by indrora

5/4/2026 at 4:04:16 PM

Hey, I work at Zed - happy to help or clarify anything that we're not doing a good job of laying out. What FAQ are you referring to?

by morgankrey

5/2/2026 at 9:08:43 PM

Great, here’s how to remove it from your commits:

Run git commit --amend

Your text editor will open. Delete the line: Co-authored-by: Github Copilot <noreply@github.com>

Save and exit

Force push the change: git push --force-with-lease

by ninjahawk1

5/3/2026 at 6:06:39 AM

The original commit is (publicly) preserved on Github.com until perpetuity, so I wouldn't use the term 'remove'.

by themanualstates

5/2/2026 at 9:10:59 PM

[flagged]

by lpcvoid

5/2/2026 at 9:26:42 PM

I like your solution better.

by ninjahawk1

5/3/2026 at 1:07:28 AM

So what's next ... Is this a proof for when they are going to charge you a 30% commission on your sales for products build with their tools?

by vb-8448

5/3/2026 at 2:16:10 AM

Determining AI provenance is really tricky and difficult when you have so many different ways to author code. Looks like VS Code has decided that by stamping all code as AI generated, it is more likely to be right than wrong. Some PM must have declared that false negatives are a lot more dangerous than false positives when it comes to AI provenance tracking

by srikanthsastry

5/2/2026 at 9:50:38 PM

This is not just a joke, it is a legal nightmare. You may be giving away the copyright ownership, or at least part of it, to Microsoft.

by coliveira

5/2/2026 at 10:05:16 PM

AI generated code is not copyrightable anyway. The only real question is how much "copiloting" you have to get ownership, and right now the courts seem to be heading towards it not mattering if AI was involved

by dwedge

5/3/2026 at 2:08:43 PM

I can only imagine this passing their “QA” because every dev there uses AI for every commit and therefore saw no issue.

by ectospheno

5/3/2026 at 3:18:39 AM

Recent and related:

Tell HN: VS Code v1.117.0 automatically adds GitHub Copilot as your co author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353 - April 2026 (36 comments)

(Looks like that one never made the front page, so we won't treat the current one as a dupe)

by dang

5/2/2026 at 9:01:20 PM

I personally don't mind if an AI inserts it's "Co-Authored by" tag into commits it has worked on - it's transparency, I used its help and it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad.

But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.

by awesome_dude

5/2/2026 at 9:33:48 PM

> it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad

Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.

Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.

by vunuxodo

5/2/2026 at 10:47:35 PM

I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?

DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?

by awesome_dude

5/3/2026 at 1:57:32 AM

You, and those others, are people. The clanker is not, and should not get the privileges of a person.

by bigstrat2003

5/3/2026 at 2:59:16 AM

"We made this in C#"

"Our team used Go"

"Rewrite it in Rust"

Funny, we credit technology all the time.

by awesome_dude

5/2/2026 at 9:05:28 PM

I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?

by low_tech_love

5/2/2026 at 9:21:08 PM

It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.

by dlivingston

5/2/2026 at 9:10:19 PM

It's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)

by JoshTriplett

5/2/2026 at 9:22:45 PM

GCC isn't making editorial decisions.

by Jtarii

5/2/2026 at 9:18:42 PM

The LLM is just a database. Would you be fine if this was done when cribbing stuff from Github, StackOverflow, tutorials and so on, or do you think some databases are more special than others in this regard, and if so, on what merit?

by cess11

5/2/2026 at 10:49:11 PM

I regularly link comments in my code pointing to the source of the code I have "cribbed"

It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.

by awesome_dude

5/3/2026 at 6:08:33 AM

withing ONE week, Microsoft one-sidedly decided to

1. increase the LLM usage by 20x in Copilot

2. add rate hourly (roughly 4 hours blocks) and weekly rate limits to models use in Copilot

3. introduce credit based billing where you can't roll over unused credits

4. and now inserts themself to the commits as co-author

Man, I really feel like they want us to hate them

by gyoridavid

5/3/2026 at 6:44:49 AM

> Man, I really feel like they want us to hate them

Man, I feel old.

by cdata

5/4/2026 at 6:56:43 PM

To me, the more interesting question is the following. Why does the architecture make it possible for a system to collect user consent and divorce the enforcement of it from the consent collection itself? The proposed process fixes are good and all, but really, the fix IMHO should be structural. Your CI should fail if you don't propagate consent decisions down the stack.

Also worth noting: `Co-Authored-By` implies joint authorship. The Linux kernel uses `Assisted-by:` for AI specifically because the legal weight is different. And git history is permanent. You can revert a default. You can't revert commit history across thousands of repos.

by srikanthsastry

5/2/2026 at 11:34:09 PM

My early paranoia about corporate AI is really maturing. No one’s really laughing at me anymore either.

by slowhadoken

5/3/2026 at 11:37:53 AM

Question -- is this a general feature that detects which AI agent was used to edit your code (Claude, Codex, etc) and inserts THAT agent's name into the commit message's trailer. Or this pnly detects and inserts (Github) Copilot as a co-author?

by albert_e

5/3/2026 at 2:04:42 PM

For me it just inserted "Copilot" and I was only using inline completion, not agents. A bit weird too since my VSCode doesn't even have copilot installed as an extension (I had just started using that editor again on an old linux install and was wondering why I was even getting AI completions).

by trashface

5/3/2026 at 12:09:49 AM

PMs at Microsoft have incredibly bad taste

by i386

5/3/2026 at 12:15:28 AM

I mean, they chose to work for Microsoft.

by Andrex

5/3/2026 at 6:02:30 PM

The best part is: Copilot did not catch the impact/implications of this change in the (automatic) review.

Should we continue to keep trusting the AI review provided by Copilot?

by pvtmert

5/2/2026 at 11:53:14 PM

quote: "Thank you all for your feedback, professional or otherwise. Sorry about the regression. I will work on fixing this in 1.119.

There is a number of issues with the Co-Author functionality:

It should never have been enabled when disableAIFeatures is on. It should not add attribution to changes that were not done by AI. We need to make sure it receives a more test coverage before change the default. If you have additional (constructive) feedback, please ping me directly or open an issue."

by KyleBerezin

5/3/2026 at 7:58:48 AM

Agreed, fixed disableAiFeatures in my PR: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931 Will work on making it better later.

by dmitriv

5/4/2026 at 6:29:03 AM

But it should still add the tagline when copilot has been used, without direct approval by the user?

by fastasucan

5/3/2026 at 4:55:25 PM

They do not care about customers because they are the customer and users are hostages. They only care about hostage count and other shitty metrics.

by starkeeper

5/3/2026 at 6:33:31 PM

I really, really, really like Github Copilot agent harness. I was using it as my primary coding agent for the past year. I really hope it will remain affordable. I knew that $10/month won't last forever for the amount of usage I was getting out of it. It's far better than claude code and codex that I'm testing now (because I burned weekly limit in less than a day).

by predkambrij

5/2/2026 at 10:17:52 PM

It's all because of ridiculous performance systems of some $BIGTECH$

"Here's we increased number of commits by Copilot from X to Y, %Z increase"

by ozirus

5/3/2026 at 11:31:09 AM

I wonder what sort of liability this introduces for Microsoft when their 'Co-Aauthored by Copilot' code causes harm.

by ludicrousdispla

5/3/2026 at 1:17:10 AM

This is why I never ever commit through the gui.

by hparadiz

5/3/2026 at 2:18:51 PM

Incredible.

I would like to study the of people who thought it is a good idea.

Reading comments on GitHub made me laugh.

Made me also wonder, what's the next step?

by marsxr360

5/3/2026 at 3:02:10 PM

It would be to starting giving a chance to other competitors. I have been very comfortable zed except for 2 issues (on Linux). After they are resolved, I will probably start using it 100% of the time.

by mert-kurttutan

5/3/2026 at 12:00:00 AM

just use vscodium (opensource vscode without microsoft's spyware) stop giving an increasingly incompetent org more control over your data ppl.

https://vscodium.com/

Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.

by nisten

5/3/2026 at 9:22:58 AM

Left with no choice but to add "co-authored with man + ansible-doc" to everything now

by bravetraveler

5/3/2026 at 1:22:31 PM

The "regardless of usage" in the HN title isn't correct. If you dig into the source you see that the attribution line is only added when some changes in the commit come from Copilot, either inline completion or agent. @dang

by croemer

5/3/2026 at 2:01:58 PM

That is the crux of the issue: the detection of whether the changes came from copilot or not is buggy, thus all changes are flagged as coming from copilot, thus the title is correct.

by tuetuopay

5/4/2026 at 5:18:56 AM

That's not what the Pull Request intends, though. There's a difference between "This PR is buggy and enables attribution on everything" vs "VS Code enables attribution on everything".

The title is fuzzy on intent, making people believe it's intentional when one shouldn't assume intention (Hanlon).

by croemer

5/4/2026 at 6:27:55 AM

Who cares what it intends when they approve it and put into production?

by fastasucan

5/4/2026 at 7:20:02 AM

[dead]

by croemer

5/3/2026 at 12:48:27 PM

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

by steve1977

5/3/2026 at 1:51:10 PM

It may be incompetent malice.

by johneth

5/3/2026 at 3:55:03 PM

Or malicious incompetence?

by steve1977

5/3/2026 at 5:57:53 PM

Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by profit motives.

by xeonmc

5/2/2026 at 9:41:31 PM

Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?

by chrysoprace

5/3/2026 at 11:31:22 AM

Given that there are 536 different types of "Copilot" under Microsoft umbrella, I am surprised they did not distinguish between GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot here.

by albert_e

5/3/2026 at 2:00:09 PM

Was this rolled out to individuals (especially non paying accounts) early? I was hit by this over a week ago on my side project, but it seems to be just blowing up now.

by trashface

5/2/2026 at 9:09:02 PM

The day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.

by booleandilemma

5/3/2026 at 11:18:25 AM

Unfortunately zed is not a complete, finished product in the sense that VSCode is.

by baobabKoodaa

5/2/2026 at 9:34:56 PM

So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow

by rbbydotdev

5/2/2026 at 8:54:49 PM

Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?

by Animats

5/2/2026 at 10:08:32 PM

The real question is why Anthropic was able to use DMCA takedown requests "in good faith" against the Claude leaks when their own CTO claimed it is a 100% slopcoded codebase, and they themselves argue that all LLM generated code is transformed enough to not be copyrightable. Which they have to state without being able to turn back because they violated millions of book and software licenses during training.

Make it make sense.

by cookiengineer

5/2/2026 at 11:06:26 PM

Truth, law and consequences (for the capital class) are so last year.

by naruhodo

5/3/2026 at 3:31:27 AM

You can lie.

You can get away with lying.

You can lie to judges.

You can get away with lying to judges.

You can profit from getting away with lying to judges.

A judge isn't involved, anyway. The leaker would have to take you to court and then prove that your request was in bad faith and that they didn't infringe copyright.

Competent programmers understand how to tell the computer what needs to happen. Really good programmers understand how the computer executed the code, and take advantage of it - they know about speculative execution and cache prefetching. Competent lawyers know what the law says. Really good lawyers understand how the law is executed, and take advantage of it - they know when it won't be enforced.

by tardedmeme

5/2/2026 at 11:11:43 PM

What? Training is not inference. Reading books is not the same as writing.

by ashirviskas

5/3/2026 at 1:10:51 AM

Maybe read up on how transformers, their encoders and decoders, and the attention matrix works?

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

by cookiengineer

5/2/2026 at 9:15:15 PM

If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright.

And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.

by Dylan16807

5/2/2026 at 10:26:07 PM

> If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright

How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?

by lelanthran

5/3/2026 at 3:27:07 AM

No. Legal ownership doesn't depend on whether aislop edited your commit message.

by tardedmeme

5/3/2026 at 1:00:07 AM

The bot (and therefore microsoft) doesn't get any copyright at all.

by Dylan16807

5/3/2026 at 5:51:21 AM

> The bot (and therefore microsoft) doesn't get any copyright at all.

But then neither do you, for every commit that was marked with copilot.

by lelanthran

5/3/2026 at 10:01:24 AM

What makes you say that?

If a monkey uses a typewriter, there's no copyright.

If I use a typewriter with a monkey, I get copyright and the monkey doesn't.

Why would the monkey need copyright for me to get copyright?

by Dylan16807

5/3/2026 at 1:28:07 PM

> If I use a typewriter with a monkey, I get copyright and the monkey doesn't.

Right, because monkeys cannot be granted copyright. If you use a typewriter along with Microsoft, the resulting copyright will be owned jointly.

This story isn't about a monkey claiming co-authorship, it's about Microsoft claiming co-authorship.

by lelanthran

5/3/2026 at 6:34:10 PM

> This story isn't about a monkey claiming co-authorship, it's about Microsoft claiming co-authorship.

I don't understand your position.

Your previous post was agreeing that Microsoft wouldn't get copyright on copilot output, wasn't it? I said the bot doesn't get copyright and you said "neither do you".

Why are you now saying Microsoft would get copyright?

Copilot is a robo-monkey owned by Microsoft.

by Dylan16807

5/3/2026 at 11:16:27 AM

If I write "I own lelanthran's car", does that make me the legal owner of your car? No?

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 1:30:09 PM

> If I write "I own lelanthran's car", does that make me the legal owner of your car?

If I counter sign agreement, certainly. How do you think that sales of both movable and immovable property work?

by lelanthran

5/3/2026 at 1:33:23 PM

That's not what we were talking about. We were talking about a third party modifying your document without your consent (and sometimes even without your knowledge). You write git commit "Fix bug" and then a third party swoops in the night and modifies that with "Co-authored by: Microsoft".

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 1:57:21 PM

> That's not what we were talking about. We were talking about a third party modifying your document without your consent (and sometimes even without your knowledge). You write git commit "Fix bug" and then a third party swoops in the night and modifies that with "Co-authored by: Microsoft".

Right, and how is a court supposed to differentiate between the cases when copilot was not sharing your typewriter and cases when it was?

by lelanthran

5/5/2026 at 6:11:20 AM

I don't know! How is the court supposed to differentiate between a forged document and an authentic one? A question for the ages.

by baobabKoodaa

5/2/2026 at 9:08:51 PM

The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent.

Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop.

I can't wait for:

* The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent copyright for machine generated code.

* The first company to get nailed to the wall for reverse engineering and replicating high profile copyrighted code, like Windows.

by redwall_hp

5/2/2026 at 10:25:46 PM

Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated

by circuit10

5/4/2026 at 5:54:37 PM

Auto-adding AI as a co-author feels wrong unless users explicitly opt in.

Defaults matter a lot in developer tools.

by ishizakahiroshi

5/3/2026 at 8:34:29 AM

How long do you think it will take before the Free & Pro plans start showing ads in vscode and its terminal?

by yoda7marinated

5/3/2026 at 8:47:13 AM

KPI maxxing gone wrong

What's the legality of this, does this mean you give Copilot exclusive rights to your projects?

Fishy fishy

by WhereIsTheTruth

5/3/2026 at 2:41:17 AM

Wondering what else I'm using from MS that might be at risk. <glances at TypeScript>

by pglevy

5/3/2026 at 4:02:02 AM

Changes the defaults. Does not care to provide a pull request description. Talk about hubris.

by starefossen

5/2/2026 at 10:27:06 PM

To everyone who bought the "developer-friendly" Microsoft of VSCode fame from a few years ago: this is what they forever did, and forever will do.

This company has been pulling these tricks since the early 90s.

If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.

by artyom

5/3/2026 at 1:27:32 AM

You’re forgetting the fact that the newer generations coming into the industry don’t know that. They don’t even know what a VHS tape is and some don’t even know what a DVD is — this isn’t a problem it’s just their baseline is different from ours. Global warming is an example of this: newer generations see today’s conditions as normal but we older generations see them as broken and a problem.

To be direct about this: this is actually our fault they fell for this. It’s your fault too. We’re the ones building the future for the next generation/s, so whatever “tricks” they fall for are created by our generation (to extract or generate wealth, amongst other things.)

That’s on us to do better through education and fighting back.

by movedx

5/3/2026 at 1:36:02 AM

The younger generations aren't really that stupid. They know what a DVD is for gosh sake.

They also know the conditions they have to endure - economic, climate, whatever - are not normal or okay. They're well aware of who to blame for those.

by squigz

5/3/2026 at 12:36:55 AM

> If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.

We don’t need snarky comments like this, especially when the technology in question is so pervasive and takes a lot of cognitive effort to avoid. The blame lies solely with Microsoft.

by joohwan

5/3/2026 at 2:56:03 AM

What you call snarky, I call individual accountability.

by artyom

5/3/2026 at 3:19:15 AM

[flagged]

by tardedmeme

5/3/2026 at 2:57:11 PM

Should preventing inhaling smoke in public spaces be also individual accountability?

by wiseowise

5/3/2026 at 12:19:32 AM

The very young do not always do as they are told.

If one hasn't been personally betrayed yet, it is easy to minimize or ignore the warnings of others who have been through the predatory/anticompetitive, EEE, stack ranking, etc. eras of MS.

by ninjagoo

5/3/2026 at 12:32:13 AM

I agree with you in very general terms, but I'm not sure you can reach the level of "market share" VSCode has had the last few years with just the very young.

by artyom

5/3/2026 at 2:32:56 AM

True that.

No question VSCode has some real structural advantages: free (as opposed to pricey VS Enterprise licenses - this matters in non-tech enterprises), somehow easily installable even in enterprise locked-down environments, first-class webdev support, first-class python integration, extensive extension/plugin ecosystem, extensive multi-language support, excellent wsl integration, and that MIT source license to PR their way out of their EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) infamy.

There's no other free IDE quite with this set of features. Eclipse is a heavy heavy lumbering thing.

It's not even a mystery why it has a lot more traction than vscodium - that sweet sweet MIT license means it's a good thing right? Salves that mental nag in the conscientious.

It takes a principled, die-hard attitude to use vscodium over vscode, or something else altogether, especially if you're a multi-talented dev.

That's the thing about giant corporations, they tend to outlive human careers. MS has outlived the careers of Gates, Balmer, and likely Nadella. Google has outlived Page/Brin, Schmidt. IBM so many. Volkswagen likewise. Even Comcast survived the worst-company-in-america days. Ma Bell continues to survive as Verizon, AT&T. Sony too. Railroads continue to this day. Hence the modern day race to get as large as possible, as quickly as possible.

Opposition due to incidents fades over time as people simply walk away into the sunset. That big boss that you have to defeat at the end of the game? Simply goes on to fight other players once you leave.

by ninjagoo

5/3/2026 at 3:48:12 AM

> It takes a principled, die-hard attitude to use vscodium over vscode, or something else altogether, especially if you're a multi-talented dev.

Maybe in some areas this is true. But there are and long have been a lot of really good text editors in the world. All it takes is a pretty mild preference for free software in this case.

by isityettime

5/3/2026 at 4:08:38 AM

> All it takes is a pretty mild preference for free software in this case.

Presumably, you mean free-as-in-freedom, not free-as-in-beer. Still, there is that VSCode MIT source license to distract the naive.

And that tells us something about the state of the world, unfortunately. The number of folks with that mild preference is small, just going by the overall adoption of free-as-in-freedom software, in general.

by ninjagoo

5/3/2026 at 1:21:29 AM

Right, you also need the very gullible

by estimator7292

5/2/2026 at 10:59:56 PM

You may be surprised to learn some of the employed adults on this site were born after the 90’s.

by cheschire

5/2/2026 at 11:25:22 PM

And hopefully those employed adults have done their due diligence and read some history.

by vermilingua

5/2/2026 at 11:45:59 PM

Unfortunately, quite a few of these young adults ignored the people who lived through it last time and were repeatedly warning them about it.

by justinclift

5/3/2026 at 4:41:11 PM

"You can't make people care."

Not until they've personally been hurt by something.

Unfortunately I can't recall who said this, it was the beginning of a tech talk and it made something instantly click for me.

We have almost no way to influence both politicians and corporations because an individual informed vote gets lost in the avalanche of votes by people who don't care. The biggest lie a few hundred years ago was that "all men are created equal" told to the general population by people who owned slaves. The biggest lie in our generation is that we have democracy.

1) It's impossible to vote for what you really want because the choice is restricted to predefined options - political parties are only a few points in a highly dimensional space representing what people actually want.

2) Everyone votes on everything and every vote has the same weight. It's impossible to target your vote to one issue you researched deeply - it'll be lost in the noise of people who are voting about something completely unrelated but their vote picks a party which in turn affects your issue.

3) Corporations, especially in tech, have just as much influence as the government and they're little dictatorships. Not even their workers can influence their decisions directly.

by martin-t

5/3/2026 at 4:21:28 PM

Ironically the one good thing we got from AI is being able to sift through everyone's entire internet history (even de-anonymizing the stuff they didn't want under their regular nicks) and being able to tell exactly who supported this.

by martin-t

5/3/2026 at 12:04:17 AM

Ok but I’ve used VSCode for almost 10 years, got mad at this once, and disabled it instantly. This sucks, but maybe don’t overreact?

by thiht

5/3/2026 at 12:26:37 AM

I'd like my tools to not have a time-bomb attached to them, no matter if it takes 10 years to explode.

And honestly I think this case is just a perpetually clueless manager getting over-joyous with vibecoding (to the point of being marveled at changing two lines of code without blowing everything up).

It's probably going to be reverted in the coming days. Which doesn't change the fact that it's a very Microsoft way of operating.

by artyom

5/3/2026 at 12:40:30 AM

Yeah, a company can only be shitty and "fix" their mistakes for so long until the general public realizes that the company doesn't have its customers best interests at heart.

by abustamam

5/3/2026 at 5:00:04 PM

Feels like a poor philosophy to me. 10 years feels like plenty of value to get out of something before switching.

by stravant

5/3/2026 at 7:07:54 AM

How is this a time bomb? What was destroyed?

by therealdrag0

5/3/2026 at 1:58:32 AM

- Automatically activated audio cues (purportedly for accessibility) without consideration for users with auditory sensitivity; continued to release changes that would override attempts to disable the unwanted sound; dismissed with "but how else could we possibly notify people that we added the feature?"

- Refusing for over seven years to offer a simple UI to clear "issues" pane, instead blaming plugin authors for not 'owning' the content. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/66982

Microsoft hasn't cared about the actual users of VSCode for a very long time.

by jagged-chisel

5/3/2026 at 12:25:27 AM

Just because you can opt out doesn't mean that they're not shitty for defaulting you to opt in.

by abustamam

5/3/2026 at 1:39:17 AM

It is certainly bad behavior that Microsoft did this. But it's irrational to jump from there to "this is what they always did and always will do" as OP did. Corporations are not unchangeable monoliths, and it was perfectly reasonable to use Microsoft tools when they were acting decently towards their users. Now that they have turned user-hostile, it makes sense to avoid them until they learn their lesson, and so on.

People act like a corporation has character traits, as a person does. But it doesn't. You can't strongly predict future behavior based on the present the way you can with a person, so it makes no sense to have seething eternal hatred for a company.

by bigstrat2003

5/3/2026 at 3:59:06 AM

Hatred for a corporation is as useful as hatred for a nuclear bomb. No matter how harmful or destructive, it lacks any sort of free will that would make it a reasonable target for such hate.

There's actual people making it happen, though.

by artyom

5/3/2026 at 4:45:22 AM

I always take "I hate X company" as "I hate the decisions X company makes and the people who make these decisions" for this reason.

But it's kinda verbose.

by abustamam

5/3/2026 at 2:31:29 AM

Microsoft is unforgivable. So much time and so much money and they made the world worse whenever they could make a buck. They need to be broken up.

by vpribish

5/2/2026 at 9:26:07 PM

I saw this the other day and was pretty confused - I prefer to write my own commit messages and wondered if I’d accidentally let the AI do it this time. Nope, just MS changing things behind my back. Sigh.

by thombles

5/2/2026 at 9:47:14 PM

> No description provided.

Right because of course you wouldn’t provide an explanation for why such a change would be made.

Providing zero description or background or explanation for why a change is made is probably the only thing that pisses me off as much as a pure AI-slop description of a change: your job in a PR description is to give the background for why a change is being made. Honestly, any PR which doesn’t do this should be insta-closed by policy. But it totally tracks with the level of quality I’d expect from the company in question.

by ninkendo

5/3/2026 at 1:40:56 AM

It's your own fault for using anything made by microsoft at this point.

by nclin_

5/3/2026 at 3:33:59 AM

Does this include GitHub?

by tardedmeme

5/3/2026 at 11:17:10 AM

It's really hard to find alternatives. Especially for VSCode.

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 7:41:21 PM

What are the VSCode features you find difficult to replace? Zed is quite good as a similar workspace, but I can't speak to extensions.

by nclin_

5/5/2026 at 6:10:46 AM

This event got me to try Zed, and it didn't work properly with Jupyter Notebooks.

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 1:20:43 AM

Adding anything to my commits or PRs or anything else is a deal breaker TBH

by matt3210

5/2/2026 at 9:13:09 PM

Wasn’t it discussed here that no copyrights apply to code generated by AI? I’m asking myself whether adding "Co-authored-by: Copilot" means the code is not protected by the GPL, or even allows Microsoft to own your code...

by pelasaco

5/3/2026 at 10:48:16 AM

For the folks who need their IDE but w/o the slop and constant notifications, there is very good public fork called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/

Not only is it free of MS "telemetry" nonsense, it is also way quieter to use, no bullshit popups for updates etc.

by hansmayer

5/2/2026 at 10:19:32 PM

Speaking of which, why does anybody use VS Code?

https://vscodium.com/

I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.

by ekjhgkejhgk

5/3/2026 at 12:31:42 AM

Co-authored-by iPhone

by sourcegrift

5/3/2026 at 8:36:36 AM

MS sure is making a lot of strange moves as of late

by Havoc

5/2/2026 at 11:53:53 PM

Microsoft is enshittifying VS Code. I have already started looking for a lifeboat.

Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.

by bborud

5/3/2026 at 5:09:14 AM

Things are getting shittier by the day. Lovely

by ulfw

5/2/2026 at 9:32:12 PM

A lot of bitching about Microsoft here, for something Claude has been doing forever. I have a git hook that rejects any commit containing the line Co-authored by Claude

by flipthefrog

5/2/2026 at 9:37:00 PM

That's a fair point, but claude code is not an editor (yet?), and when you use claude code, and allow it to commit things, it's almost certainly "co-authored by llm".

Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.

by qezz

5/2/2026 at 9:57:54 PM

Well claude does it if you ask it to commit instead of you, and it lets you review it, this is not the case with this feature - judging by the comments on PR. Sometimes it says co-authored by copilot even when the code is not generated by AI. Also it will never say co-authored by claude or whatever, always copilot. Also why would my IDE care about this and not the AI itself?

by aledujke

5/2/2026 at 9:42:24 PM

Are you ashamed of other people finding out you used Claude? I think the co-authored-by bit should not be a setting at all, AI-generated code should be clearly identified.

by vultour

5/3/2026 at 3:53:04 AM

I use Claude at work. I've never instructed it to make a commit, and it's never attempted to make one. It would fail anyway because my commits are signed by Yubikey and it requires presence detection, so I have to tap it.

But I don't want it to make commits, and I don't want to review its code in the Claude Code TUI, either. I want to read its changes in my text editor, decide what to drop or revise or revert, and then stage individual hunks or regions into logical commits.

If anyone asks I'll tell them I used an LLM, idc. I often mention it in commit messages or PRs. But I don't want LLM agents to write commits at all.

by isityettime

5/2/2026 at 9:50:46 PM

Basically what you’re saying is that if AI does anything on your computer, anything the AI impacts you should lose control over. If the AI touched it at all in any way, big or small, you now lose ownership of the actions your computer takes (on open source tools, I might add).

In case you need reminding of common sense, I’m supposed to be allowed to decide what my commit messages are because it’s my fucking computer.

I prefer that my software is not a morality police.

by dangus

5/2/2026 at 9:47:59 PM

mind-boggling people are trying to hide this, tells you all you need to know about our “profession.” presence of that hook or the like in a place of business should be fireable offense

by bdangubic

5/2/2026 at 9:53:59 PM

> AI-generated code should be clearly identified.

Let AI autonomously produce code of a quality that I care about and I might consider giving it credit. I don't know how other people write code but I come up with an idea and use a multitude of LLMs to brainstorm a reasonably comprehensive spec that any reasonably competent person can read and produce a working program from, including a locally working Q2 quant of Qwen 3.6. Even Kimi is as good as Claude at most coding tasks, and I don't see why any single agent deserves any credit for my design.

Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.

by sieve

5/2/2026 at 10:01:21 PM

> Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.

They do, though, in the form of metadata.

by Paracompact

5/2/2026 at 10:31:44 PM

Do Adobe or Arri or Red get authorship credit for the work their hardware and software do on projects? After all, artists would not be able to produce a single pixel without them. In a similar vein, you could make the argument that modern farming is sitting on your ass in your modern tractor while software handles most of the work. Does John Deere get rights over a quarter/half your harvest?

I am stuck between the luddites and "artisanal" coders on this one. LLMs are neither as smart/useful or as dumb/useless as people think. Unless your job involves producing useless garbage every single day, good software requires a lot of thought before the first line of code is even written. For those with serious domain knowledge, the thinking time can be compressed into minutes/hours rather than days/weeks it might take.

LLMs are a tool. You either pay for it or you use the freely available ones on your own hardware. As long as the output is directed by my thinking, the output belongs to me. If it were up to me, I would abolish IPR (and even permanent ownership of land) as a category altogether, but that is a different discussion.

by sieve

5/2/2026 at 9:50:37 PM

I think the Linux kernel's standard of disclosure via the "Assisted-By" trailer is the right move.

Makes it clear you used a bullshit machine, without implying it's an author.

...assuming you think using them at all is a good move - I won't deny they have some utility (though I'd argue much lower than many seem to think), but I do presently believe they're a disaster for humanity.

The ruination of the Internet with slop, the massive propagation of propaganda, and the insanely easy-to-wield tools for abuse are in no way worth the ability to accrue tech debt at 10x velocity (though to be clear, accruing tech debt can absolutely be a useful strategy, if one I personally dislike).

by NateEag

5/2/2026 at 9:53:21 PM

I've never had Claude Code in VSCode add attribution to a commit when I didn't use it. VSCode is adding the attribution even when you have all copilot features disabled and therefore could not have used it.

by tomjakubowski

5/3/2026 at 12:41:20 AM

I already added a pre-commit hook to strip this out. Having to defend myself from my own editor is absurd.

by logickkk1

5/2/2026 at 9:33:01 PM

Please do share

by kafrofrite

5/2/2026 at 9:44:17 PM

Ask claude to “Write a hook for Claude code that rejects any get commit that includes “co-authored by Claude” in it”

by conception

5/2/2026 at 9:45:29 PM

Just ask Claude to write it..

by bethekidyouwant

5/2/2026 at 10:08:15 PM

Default or mandatory gift authorship?

by the13

5/3/2026 at 7:40:18 AM

I thank Microsoft deeply for the forced copilot crap, almost impossible to remove, that they have put into vs code. Finally after 5 years I have deleted vs code in my Mac! that was the last piece of windows software I still had around. VS code was great years ago, until Microsoft started to push crap into it – and afaik they also made the fully open-source, telemetry-free fork difficult to use with many extensions.

Really, thanks for forcing me into deleting it. turns out vim + Claude Code or codex was much better all along, it really works well for me.

by bytesandbits

5/3/2026 at 1:00:47 PM

You can turn it off.

by dbacar

5/3/2026 at 4:33:46 PM

The toxic behaviour by hn commenters in that thread is absolutely shameful. Whether you feel strongly about it or not, there is a civil way to discuss things and that isn't it.

by politelemon

5/3/2026 at 12:33:44 PM

So you add a precommit script that strips it out.

by kevin_thibedeau

5/3/2026 at 4:03:16 PM

What a shitshow. People should stop using as many Microsoft products as possible and move on. Seriously, it's the best silent feedback that can ever be delivered in cases like these.

by liendolucas

5/3/2026 at 12:45:10 AM

In typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.

by bsuvc

5/3/2026 at 1:39:12 AM

I love a good dog-pile, but there is little constructive happening in that thread beyond variations of, "WTF?".

by 3eb7988a1663

5/3/2026 at 2:06:49 AM

Who decides what is constructive?

by bsuvc

5/3/2026 at 6:51:52 AM

It kind of messes up the fake statistics if users post unwanted stuff.

by zombot

5/3/2026 at 10:02:29 AM

dmitrivMS should be fired by microsoft if they wanna take ownership of this legal fiasco

by villgax

5/3/2026 at 11:17:51 AM

Come on. At least one person at Microsoft is trying to own up to a mistake and fix it.

by baobabKoodaa

5/3/2026 at 5:23:32 AM

... they don't require code review by at least one other person before merging..?

If this is indicative of practices over at MS these days, it explains a lot.

by simianparrot

5/3/2026 at 6:52:44 AM

It's vibe coding all the way down.

by zombot

5/3/2026 at 2:34:43 PM

Every time I read one of these, I wish I could add a permanent background music to everything I say: The Hives - Hate to Say I Told You So.

by axegon_

5/3/2026 at 1:10:59 PM

sounds interesting

by 1domain

5/2/2026 at 8:58:57 PM

I really hope the editor wars don't start again. I've been happily using VsCode for years now. More than happy in fact, it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used, as evidenced by how AI companies basically started as a VsCode fork.

But this is going full-throttle on enshittification.

WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?

by preommr

5/2/2026 at 9:12:15 PM

The editor wars never ended, and VSCode has been user hostile since inception. It came with unavoidable telemetry right out the gate.

by glitchc

5/3/2026 at 3:11:30 AM

Yeah, this is part of the reason why vscodium exists.

by RandyOrion

5/2/2026 at 9:21:17 PM

vim and emacs are both still great choices.

by opan

5/2/2026 at 11:08:23 PM

I've been using *nix and usenet since the early 1990's.

I always thought "editor wars" was a particularly dumb in-joke among a small group and I feel sad when I see people who think it was ever more than that.

The Wikipedia page cites "The Jargon File" as an authoritative source of truth. Ridiculous.

by marshray

5/2/2026 at 9:03:41 PM

> WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?

"Make a great free product so that we can enshittify it later" is an infamous MS playbook. Maybe nothing happened, maybe just the usual MS at work.

by majormajor

5/3/2026 at 6:26:28 AM

"microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 hours ago" :)

by gnegggh

5/2/2026 at 9:05:02 PM

I got tired of Claude adding their signatures to my commits against my instructions (the settings schema changed at some point), so I added a commit-msg hook that blocks multi-line commits. Easy and works like a charm, and would block this sort of M$ intrusion.

What a despicable behaviour from M$.

by clutter55561

5/2/2026 at 10:12:59 PM

Finally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up

by alansaber

5/2/2026 at 11:45:12 PM

Poor Courtney

by tiberriver256

5/3/2026 at 5:04:37 AM

No personal attacks please. They're just cogs in the machine.

The organization and process that enables it to get to this point is the problem. And that is MS, always has been.

by throwaway277432

5/3/2026 at 11:19:32 AM

No-one is responsible for their own actions? Fuck Courtney.

by baobabKoodaa

5/2/2026 at 9:08:32 PM

Well, that's good news for all the developers working at companies with delusional management proclaiming "100% of code will be written by AI in 6 months"!

by morkalork

5/2/2026 at 9:39:56 PM

Claude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.

by te_chris

5/2/2026 at 10:28:31 PM

There's a large gap between what they do (same env var disables this since the beginning) vs Microsoft bucking it's way through AI coauthorship credit in a multi potential author china shop, though.

by loufe

5/2/2026 at 11:25:06 PM

That isn't the same thing.

It's you're using AI tool to code, obviously the tool should be given due credits on the commits, for ethics.

but in this case Microslop is branding any commits as "co-authored by Copilot", even if the user never used any AI tool.

This is blatant attempt violation of commits authorship ethics and user rights.

by flykespice

5/3/2026 at 10:32:00 AM

> It's you're using AI tool to code, obviously the tool should be given due credits on the commits, for ethics.

Why? Does it offend the AI if we don't? Does it change the review process if the code wasn't written by a human?

by cactusplant7374

5/3/2026 at 10:30:06 AM

What? In what world should the tool be given due credit.

by te_chris

5/3/2026 at 8:24:27 AM

[flagged]

by mohamedabdallah

5/4/2026 at 1:35:13 AM

[flagged]

by Amber-chen

5/3/2026 at 11:12:34 AM

[dead]

by altun

5/4/2026 at 5:26:12 AM

[dead]

by realjohnsewell

5/3/2026 at 2:52:37 AM

[dead]

by henry2023

5/2/2026 at 11:56:32 PM

[dead]

by iqfareez

5/6/2026 at 2:45:18 AM

[flagged]

by zhouquanxi

5/3/2026 at 9:12:19 AM

[dead]

by samagragune

5/3/2026 at 9:12:45 AM

[dead]

by samagragune

5/3/2026 at 12:44:22 AM

[flagged]

by eddyaipt

5/2/2026 at 8:53:44 PM

Growth hacking at its best /s

by c0balt

5/4/2026 at 5:34:35 AM

[flagged]

by gbrennon

5/2/2026 at 9:01:02 PM

"chat.disableAIFeatures": true

by Scarbutt

5/3/2026 at 3:25:58 AM

Not sufficient. See the GitHub thread. It is tagging things even when AI features are disabled.

by RevEng

5/2/2026 at 8:57:48 PM

If you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

5/2/2026 at 10:20:09 PM

Make sure to delete VSCode fully from any PC I have access to and annoy all my coworkers to get rid of it.

by 1dontknow

5/3/2026 at 2:18:20 AM

Finally a good answer

by 2OEH8eoCRo0

5/2/2026 at 9:03:56 PM

Moved to Zed and recommended my team do the same.

by janice1999

5/2/2026 at 11:35:17 PM

I would think that the thing to do about it (if you want to use VS Code at all; some people (such as myself) don't), should be to send a patch to prevent adding the Co-authored-by line if Copilot is disabled, so that it will only add that line if the Copilot is enabled.

by zzo38computer

5/2/2026 at 9:00:00 PM

Turn it off and rage on social media.

If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".

by preommr

5/2/2026 at 9:15:09 PM

Zed currently does not have a revenue stream. Ot's only a matter of time before the same shenanigans ensue.

by glitchc

5/2/2026 at 9:38:14 PM

Like how GNU Emacs is completely saturated with AI now?

(That's sarcasm, in case anyone wants to pretend I'm being serious.)

by msla

5/2/2026 at 10:20:47 PM

Emacs is not VC-backed.

by grg0

5/2/2026 at 10:48:47 PM

...yet.

..kidding. Obviously.

by TeriyakiBomb

5/2/2026 at 9:31:56 PM

They're a commercial entity that sells AI plans and enterprise features.

by janice1999

5/2/2026 at 10:49:41 PM

Honestly not sure how viable that is long term with the way the pricing kinda needs to go. I think the recent copilot price increase is just the tip of the iceberg.

by TeriyakiBomb

5/3/2026 at 2:02:59 AM

Zed is a nonstarter for me as long as they install additional software (third party runtimes to run LSPs) without asking my permission. That isn't acceptable behavior.

by bigstrat2003

5/2/2026 at 9:12:07 PM

Unfortunately, Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish, Microsoft supported LSPs just work better in VSCode, they are better integrated, and Zed can't do anything about LSPs memory or peformance.

by Scarbutt

5/2/2026 at 9:22:39 PM

> Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish

One could think that. But VSCode is the one that occasionally failed to simply render text.

No idea what happened these handful of times, but the UI was just completely screwed up, as if it were one of these "scratch to reveal" games, but with the file’s content (and unresponsive, obviously).

by ElFitz

5/2/2026 at 11:30:15 PM

I tried VSCode some years ago (immediately moved to Codium) and yes, it is extremely well-done for what it is. But Zed is good enough for me. Everything I care about for Python, TS/JS/CSS and C programming is available. I do not even miss the JetBrains tooling for these.

by sieve

5/2/2026 at 10:50:18 PM

I'm rooting for Zed but it does feel quite underbaked still right now.

by TeriyakiBomb

5/2/2026 at 9:05:14 PM

[dead]

by throwaway91723