If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".
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).
(That's sarcasm, in case anyone wants to pretend I'm being serious.)
..kidding. Obviously.
What's the legality of this, does this mean you give Copilot exclusive rights to your projects?
Fishy fishy
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Not only is it free of MS "telemetry" nonsense, it is also way quieter to use, no bullshit popups for updates etc.
I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.
Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.
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.
Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If this is indicative of practices over at MS these days, it explains a lot.
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?
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.
"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.
What a despicable behaviour from M$.
The organization and process that enables it to get to this point is the problem. And that is MS, always has been.
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.
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?
Should we continue to keep trusting the AI review provided by Copilot?
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."
"Here's we increased number of commits by Copilot from X to Y, %Z increase"
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?
Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.
The title is fuzzy on intent, making people believe it's intentional when one shouldn't assume intention (Hanlon).
Make it make sense.
Defaults matter a lot in developer tools.
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.
And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.
How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?
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.
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
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.
There's actual people making it happen, though.
But it's kinda verbose.
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.
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.
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.
They do, though, in the form of metadata.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if this could be related to these recent privacy related changes.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi...
Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"
So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.
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.
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
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...
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)
But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.
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.
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?
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.
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
Man, I feel old.
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.
"Our team used Go"
"Rewrite it in Rust"
Funny, we credit technology all the time.
But then neither do you, for every commit that was marked with copilot.
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?
If I counter sign agreement, certainly. How do you think that sales of both movable and immovable property work?
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.
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.
Right, and how is a court supposed to differentiate between the cases when copilot was not sharing your typewriter and cases when it was?
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.
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?
> This seems hard for me to believe. I expect more from Microsoft.
Those are some baseless expectations given the entire company's history
[0]https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313725/commits/1e70...
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
The bad news is - where else have this happened in VS Code?
- A happy user of (n)vim
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
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.
How else is a poor programmer gonna hit their KPIs and get that promo?
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.
- 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
Seethe
- 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!
Literally who?
I simply do not believe you
Only callous disregard for your users
> many similar tools do this as well
But since we have normalised that, it’s okay?
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.
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?
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.
> 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).
So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'
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
The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?
And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?
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.
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.
Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer
ERROR! Merge conflict. Please drink a verification can.
Anyone else remember the bill gates borg category on slashdot?
When Hotmail inserted “sent using Hotmail” in emails as a growth hack it didn’t have legal consequences. This might.
microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes agoand 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...
In addition, using the word microslop instead of microsoft is again justified, too.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
Then make it an extension, not a IDE-behaviour thing. Is that so complicated, so difficult?
Does anyone (or any team) have ownership of the extensions/git/package.json file?
Can you expand on this? Who "expects" their code editor to lie about using Copilot?
This isn't enough. What was the _full train of thought_ for this? Why would it be added when AI isn't used?
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not saying you owe $BigCo better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
But I'm an idiot every day too, so I can relate. We can only learn from these mistakes, keep it up!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
But well, they still have the garbage side, which seems to be spreading again.
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
And they're right.
It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.
The AI gigawatts are all in data centers.
They never cared for the environment (in this way, at least).
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.
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.
Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
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.
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.
Mmm... I think I missed that part.
So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.
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.
I don't think it's fear; it's greed.
When did this happen?
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?
"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.
You could say it's the terminal[2] user interface.
> turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface
Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.
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.
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.
VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.
I will fight against any Microsoft tooling being used at every company until I die. This is unforgivable.
Which literal 20+ year period was that?
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.)
TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it
Have we been using the same Google?
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?
"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.
I’ve always seen that practice of using the user as your recommendation lever without their consent as unethical.
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.
If AI generates code, and one just renames some variables/method signatures, then what?
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.
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 216-726-0737It's interesting to see how communication, digital and otherwise, has evolved over time.
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.
> 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.
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?
Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.
You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s
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
Would be possible to admit a brain fart and roll the change back?
It's even more frightening if so. Meaning you really thought it's something users wanted.
In another comment you say you caught it in testing and didn't think it needed fixing, which is it?
It just did though. Did you approve the PR without actually looking at the code?
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
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.
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.
It's still quite problematic IMO
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
this was malice or greed
I think many people agree 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.
> JavaScript performance was so bad you had to have a really light touch with it.
That is a very different case to VS Code which is something you can in fact use without Copilot.
(Both is not fine with me)
This should not be vibe-coded by someone who has absolutely no idea about any of these things.
Now if we could also have comments inside the code ("BEGIN/END snippet by Copilot"), that would also be great!
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,...
And it actually has pretty good interop with C++/CLI, too.
https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-update-will-help-your-pc-...
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/04/22/reduc...
"Yeah, uh, my local electric provider is burning coal 24/7 except at 9-10 pm on these 5 dates each year...."
Even before AI copyrighting software was questionable.
> "feel free to reach me directly (my alias @microsoft.com) or"
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.
That's not beyond a reasonable doubt.
But sneaking in the attribution to Copilot without approval was the feature?
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.
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.
This paper proposes a solution for which the framework/base is missing.
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.
Not wanting to admit term was taken from competing browser is perfectly fine explanation
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
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...
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.
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.
The rationale I suppose is those customers what to be more careful with code that was contributed by AI.
HTH
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.
(Edit: I meant to say PR, not issue...)
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.
(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?
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.
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.
I suppose it's kind of interesting that you could measure greed as an unusually high discount rate for the time value of 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.
In my experience, it's much simpler.
People are greedy if they make things I want cost more.
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
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.
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.
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.
Do you think the trillionaires are losing? Do you think you're likely to end up on the judge's bench?
It couldn't exist without engineers.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Funny how these "mistakes" only seem to happen in ways that align with the agenda of the supposedly non-evil corporation.
Pretty sure no one thought “let’s add a lie to every commit and hopefully no one minds. Free Marketing yay!” at Microsoft.
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.
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
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.
Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.
[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.
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/
What will amplifying its output do?
Do you want me to implement another bad idea, too?
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.
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.
What we seem to be experiencing is a combination of monopoly power/abuse, and regulatory/government/court capture to keep it in place.
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.
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.
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
They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...
Have you read this?
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
Microsoft's B2C reputation is undeniably burnt, but their B2B mindshare is unshakable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's uniquely un-automate-able about those jobs in their dream future?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are they? I seriously doubt billions of people earn 200k+ salaries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> cwebster-99 / Courtney Webster / Product Manager at @microsoft working on VS Code and GitHub Copilot!
>> No description provided.
> 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?
unfortunately that is the state of our society right now and it is hard to see this changing.
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.
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.