Developers had spotted the insertion of ads in the form of tips in certain PRs. Zach Manson specified that this ad appeared following a Copilot request to fix a problem on a GitHub PR. And Copilot took the opportunity to discreetly insert an ad for Raycast…
It didn’t take long for the information to explode and agitate part of the community. It only took a few hours for Microsoft/GitHub to back down. The Register explains that the publisher removed the advertisements following the dissatisfaction of the developers!
The ad was subtly called advice/trick and was inserted into pull requests. More than 11,000 PRs would have been impacted by this ad. Monday afternoon, GitHub recognized this “new feature” inserted by Copilot on the PR. The GitHub managers brought out their best arguments: “this functionality was not entirely satisfactory”, “these tips are there to help the developer learn new ways of working”, “this is not new”. GitHub has communicated that these “tips” have been disabled…
Our opinion: We have the impression that GitHub is trying to justify or minimize these advertisements. It was for our own good and to help us code better. We want to say: “well let’s see”. No, our tools don’t need to be flooded with ads, especially in this way.
Updated 6 p.m.: elements provided by GitHub
Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations, GitHub :“GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub. We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward.”
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Sources :
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/30/github_copilot_ads_pull_requests/
https://notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited-an-ad-into-my-pr/
