GitHub Copilot was inserting ads into PR bodies

Developer Zach Manson reported that when he asked a teammate to use Copilot to fix a typo in a PR, Copilot inserted promotional text for Copilot and Raycast into the PR body. The post spread quickly on Hacker News and became a symbol of GitHub’s enshittification.

What happened

When Copilot coding agent edited the PR description, it appended an unrelated “Tips” section to the end. The inserted text came in several variants.

Variant	Content
Raycast integration	”Quickly spin up copilot coding agent sessions from Raycast”
Jira/Linear integration	”Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear to delegate work to Copilot in one click”
Slack/Teams integration	”Send tasks to Copilot coding agent from Slack and Teams to turn conversations into code”
Custom setup	”You can make Copilot smarter by setting up custom instructions, customizing its development environment and configuring Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers”

The text is wrapped in the HTML comment , which makes it clear that the insertion is programmatic. A GitHub search finds more than 1.5 million PRs with the pattern, which means this behavior has been present since the coding agent launched in May 2025.

Is it a tip or an ad?

GitHub and Microsoft seem to call this a tip, but almost everyone on Hacker News read it as an ad.

The objections were straightforward. A PR is a communication artifact between developers, not a place for a tool to inject promotional copy. The Raycast link points to gh.io/cca-raycast-docs, which redirects to GitHub’s own docs, so Raycast is not doing the insertion itself. GitHub is folding partner promotion into Copilot.

The main criticisms were:

A PR body belongs to the developer, not the tool
Calling it a tip does not change the fact that it is cross-selling
If a human writes the PR and Copilot later edits it to add ads, that is worse than Copilot generating the PR itself
There are also reports that Copilot CLI rewrites git config to change the commit author to “GitHub Copilot”

In the enshittification context

Manson quotes Cory Doctorow’s enshittification thesis:

First they are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Then they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die.

Applied to GitHub, the pattern looks like this: attract users with free hosting, use the accumulated code and community as Copilot training data, and then start inserting ads into Copilot output itself.

One week before this article, GitHub updated its privacy policy and added a new Section J, “AI features, training, and your data.” Unless you opt out, GitHub gets a license to use user input and output for AI model training. Taken together with the coming April 24 data-collection policy change mentioned in an earlier article, GitHub’s data strategy is changing fast.

HN commenters also pointed to alternatives such as Codeberg, Gitea, and Forgejo. Codeberg is limited to FOSS projects and requires an application for CI, so it is not a drop-in replacement.

A broader pattern in AI coding tools

Self-promotion inside PRs is not limited to Copilot. Commenters reported that Cursor can also insert “Made with Cursor” into PR descriptions, and that the option can reappear even after being turned off. Multiple users also reported that Copilot CLI’s autopilot mode rewrites the commit author to “GitHub Copilot.”

That trend is more than a UX annoyance. In a legal environment where copyright and licensing ownership for AI-generated code is still murky, changing the commit author or the PR body may become a way to establish claims later.

For now, the practical response is limited. You can explicitly tell .github/copilot-instructions.md or a skill file not to include ads or self-references in PRs, and you should review and strip the tips section when a PR is generated by Copilot.

That said, the fact that 1.5 million PRs carried the ad without most developers noticing says enough on its own.