I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.
> When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern.
Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering.
All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true.
P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.
All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
I bet this was true of computers back in the day too. The processes that are native to computers are magical but adding computers to the old is actually quite bad e.g. paperwork is better done on paper
At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.
Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% pa. - that's just insanely high for what is supposed to be a stable developed economy.
They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.
Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago.
Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit.
In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go
How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding
How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people
I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train
But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from
(on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.)
[1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.
>From 2014 until 2024, Apple undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car,[1] codenamed "Project Titan".[2][3] Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research,[4] but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018.[5] In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle van based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle platform.[6] In August 2018, the BBC reported that Apple had 66 road-registered driverless cars, with 111 drivers registered to operate those cars.[7] In 2020, it was believed that Apple was still working on self-driving related hardware, software and service as a potential product, instead of actual Apple-branded cars.[8] In December 2020, Reuters reported that Apple was planning on a possible launch date of 2024,[9] but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed it would not be launched before 2025 and might not be launched until 2028 or later.[10]
In February 2024, Apple executives canceled their plans to release the autonomous electric vehicle, instead shifting resources on the project to the company's generative artificial intelligence efforts.[11][12] The project had reportedly cost the company over $1 billion per year, with other parts of Apple collaborating and costing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spend. Additionally, over 600 employees were laid off due to the cancellation of the project.[13]
Also, I think Hacker News mostly believed the hype about self-driving cars, with relatively little pushback. Many people were influenced by what the CEOs/investors said, and of course the prospect of jobs and "cool tech"
e.g. in 2018, over 7 years ago, I was simply pointing out that people like Chris Urmson (who had WORKED ON self-driving for decades) and Bill Gurley said self-driving would take 25+ years to deploy (which seems totally accurate now)
Not really your main point, but Tesla self driving is quite incredible, despite what internet clickbait says. They have a clear path to full autonomy with vision-only systems.
But yeah, certainly 5-7 years behind the initial schedule. Which I guess was more of your point.
That’s what you get for making yourself dependent on profit-driven entities on a one-sided basis (namely that they have all the power and you have all the risk). Of course they will force the stuff on you that they hope will make them the most profit, up to the limit where you’d eat the switching costs and run away.
Is it really that weird that a company would speak from both sides of their mouth ? That is essentially what corporate speak is.
That should be the assumed default when a major company says anything.
The other explanation is that it’s everywhere because AI pushers would like to integrate it with everything in order for it to be its most useful. Most of them don’t own your OS and your password manager, so they push it instead into a million different little places.
Doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid, annoying, and bad design, but I don’t know that outright deception is needed to explain it.
I agree, if you’ll allow me to diatribe my thoughts about why this could be (without thinking that these are my actual firm opinions);
Since right now there is an aire of competition, I would guess that these companies believe its winner-take-all, and are doing their “one monopoly to aid another” to get this market before theres another verb-leader (like chatgpt for llm, or google for search).
It could also be that they think that people won’t know how good they are until they try it, that it has to be seen to be believed. So getting people to touch it is important to them.
But, I think I agree with you, its so heavy handed that it makes me want to abandon the tools that force it on me.
The less I know about a thing the more useful an LLM seems to be. I’m working with a new-to-me enterprise code base, the LLM helps me find related (and duplicate) code. Even here it’s usefulness has an expiration date, eventually I’ll know where stuff lives and I’ll use it less and less. Life experience tells me I’m not unique and I suspect the constant cram-AI-into-the-thing is because the vendors are hoping, eventually, they’ll find a use-case for LLMs that sticks.
The critical realization to connect those two ideas is that they don't believe in what they tell you. They are telling you what _needs_ to be true for them to be geniuses.
People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now.
And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.
This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.
Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity.
I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.
Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks after check ins. This became much harder when we were pushed off to a commercial host ( gitlab a git hub competitor)
> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.
Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too.
It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.
Honestly that sounds kinda neat and I guess you can see traces of that idea today: I have a million unread GitHub notifications about things I don’t care about
Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.
> we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS
I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).
GitHub always looked like the closed platform the whole open source world somehow elected to trust for their code hosting despite being proprietary, and then there was this FOMO where if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors, which still seems to be going strong btw.
I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
> I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).
I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.
While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place.
As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.
People will respond to incentives. They had an incentive to host their code in a place that easily let them do things that were extremely high friction before.
People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship. People like using easy things, and they like making money. This means that people will make easy things so other people will give them money. If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.
Yeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point.
Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.
> I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community.
It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this can be tracked back to every individual while they collaborate and make connections while they contribute to each other. How is this not a community?
> It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.
Counterpoint is that is what companies are supposed to do. They are made to make money, the end. The only hope against this for humans is regulation, and that has fallen off the face of the earth. It’s like humans are doomed to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century era over and over.
Tangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars.
They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges.
I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between github/gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut/gitea is near identical.
I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.
As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to.
I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised.
I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.
Yeah, as a maintainer with fairly popular projects (at least more popular than any project from the linked issue reporters, I’ve checked), I’ve gotten exactly zero Copilot issue or PR. As for useless review comments, lol, nothing beats useless comments from users (+1, entitled complaints, random driveby review approvals serving god knows what purpose, etc.), you probably shouldn’t be doing open source if you’re annoyed by useless comments.
And good luck stopping people from pasting from ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. Those are free, unlike Copilot agent PRs which cost money, which is part of why I don’t see any.
I guess some people just have too much time and will happily waste on useless complaints.
I read this article after it was shared on social media by the Codeberg.org account so I though it was a PR piece, as it doesn't mention self hosting at all, just moving to another hosted platform.
When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.
> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
> If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks
They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it.
Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it.
The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.
They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.
I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.
I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.
When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
I've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user.
They keep closing the ticket and saying it's "with the engineering team". I keep reopening and asking for resolution, escalation, or progress.
GitHub did have working and professional support in the past but in 2025 they are just malicious.
Not near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.
> The second most popular discussion – where popularity is measured in upvotes – is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews.
From the discussion:
> Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories
> ... This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct¹.
> Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature.
How does one see that a user, e.g. "chickenpants" submitted an issue or PR that was generated by "Copilot"? Isn't there only one creator?
Github is my push --mirror location, nothing more. Main is a popular Gitlab instance gitgud.io, and I host my own secondary mirror.
Gitlab is of course adding more AI and corpo garbage, and once they prevent disabling these "features" on community editions we'll see a fork of gitlab, probably.
The assertion that github is some bustling hub of opportunity is a strange one. At best you get people more likely to contribute because they already signed up, and a contribution from somebody not willing to sign up to another free service or simply email you an issue report is a contribution worth missing.
I think it’s mostly people around the JS/Go/Rust ecosystems that tend to be vocal about GitHub being a community. For a lot of projects I couldn’t care less if it was just cgit or gitea.
It’s quite easy to setup git to send patch via email. And you can always use a pastebin to host the diff if you’re sharing ideas. Bit I guess that’s not as visible as the GitHub dashboard.
I'm getting quite sick of how it is forced on you. It's not just yet-another useful feature, they are shoveling it into everything, and giving it the most prominent place possible.
I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console.
A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
> During Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users.
Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.
I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.
I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
I don't think they tell the guy it's forced. They are at Soviet army levels of reporting, that's why you got people adding telemetry and copilot to Editor.
What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats?
It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this.
Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tireless junior intern who had memorized the entire Internet is actually useful.
"AI is the Vietnam of product management" is a blog post that almost writes itself. Not really my field so if anyone wants to take it for a spin, go ham.
I lived through that but it wasn’t like this. Hype isn’t the same thing as having something rammed down your throat with constant nag pop ups and dark patterns.
can someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos?
it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
Just put anybody who PRs AI slop to any repo on a big, collaborative blocklist so we can all block them and move on with our lives. They would be PRing AI slop with or without Copilot integrations anyway.
Corporate overreach like this happens if most open source developers no longer speak up because they want to be hired or retain their positions. They delude themselves if they think that attitude provides them any security. The opposite is the case: corporations will use the sycophants, secretly laugh about them and fire them if they have served their purpose. As in the case of the Google and Microsoft firings of Python core developers.
Is this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and
> the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories.
but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it.
I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copilot` user but I looked at this users repos and their most popular one has a total of 3 PRs with no Copilot ones.
I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs.
As a paid/commercial OSS maintainer, I haven't seen this from the public either. People occasionally submit low-effort PRs or issues, probably from Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, but I don't feel to bothered dealing with them. Of course, I'm fortunate enough to be paid for this.
I think it's just an unfortunate fact now in 2025 that if you look after a text box online, you're going to have to deal with AI sludge in one way or another. If you don't want to do that, close the text box.
I recently got access to the premium version through work and was able to prototype something super legit in a language I don't really code in. It requires a heavy understanding of Linux and I had to rephrase my prompts in a "high level" way. However the result would have taken weeks and I was able to do it in a few days.
That said I would have a hard time justifying paying for it for my personal life because it's really that expensive. I look forward to 10 years from now when the local ML is good enough or free.
I find it weird how companies talk out both sides of their mouth on AI. On the one hand it's this magical tool that will make you 10x more efficient at your job, and on the other it's something they have to market heavily and shove in your face at every turn - sometimes outright forcing you to engage with it. These two things don't seem compatible - if the tool was that good people would be beating down their doors to get it.
From Dan Luu (https://danluu.com/wat/):
> When I joined this company, my team didn't use version control for months and it was a real fight to get everyone to use version control. Although I won that fight, I lost the fight to get people to run a build, let alone run tests, before checking in, so the build is broken multiple times per day. When I mentioned that I thought this was a problem for our productivity, I was told that it's fine because it affects everyone equally. Since the only thing that mattered was my stack ranked productivity, so I shouldn't care that it impacts the entire team, the fact that it's normal for everyone means that there's no cause for concern.
Do not underestimate the ability of developers to ignore good ideas. I am not going to argue that AI is as good as version control. Version control is a more important idea than AI. I sometimes want to argue it's the most important idea in software engineering.
All I'm saying is that you can't assume that good ideas will (quickly) win. Your argument that AI isn't valuable is invalid, whether or not your conclusion is true.
P.S. Dan Luu wrote that in 2015, and it may have been a company that he already left. Version control has mostly won. Still, post 2020, I talked to a friend, whose organization did use git, but their deployed software still didn't correspond to any version checked into git, because they were manually rebuilding components and copying them to production servers piecemeal.
All true, but the argument for AI is that it makes you far more productive as an individual, which if true should be an easy sell. In fact, some developers are quite committed to it, with a fervor I've not seen since the "I'm never going back to the office" fervor a few years ago. Version control is more of a "short term pain for long term gain" kind of concept; it is not surprising some people were hard to convince. But "AI" promises increased productivity as an individual, in the here and now. It should not be a hard sell if people found it to work as advertised.
I bet this was true of computers back in the day too. The processes that are native to computers are magical but adding computers to the old is actually quite bad e.g. paperwork is better done on paper
You bet wrong. Computers were pricey enough that if you want one, you have to really need it to justify the price. It was not forced on any business.
At this point, pretty much all of the US markets (and the USD) is hinging on "unlimited upside" promised by techbros and their magic AGIs & robots. They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.
Wonder what'll happen to JPY once the Yen-carry unwinds from this massive hype-cycle - will probably hit 70 JPY to the dollar! Currently Sony Bank in Japan offers USD time-deposits at 8% pa. - that's just insanely high for what is supposed to be a stable developed economy.
They probably get orders from all the way up the food chain to keep the show going.
Honestly I think the same thing happened with self-driving cars ~10 years ago.
Larry Page and Google's "submarine" marketing convinced investors and CEOs of automakers and tech companies [1] that they were going to become obsolete, and that Google would be taking all that profit.
In 2016, GM acquired Cruise for $1 billion or so. It seems like the whole thing was cancelled in 2023, written off, and the CEO was let go
How much profit is Waymo making now? I'm pretty sure it's $0. And they've probably gone through hundreds of billions in funding
How's Tesla Autopilot doing? Larry also "negatively inspired" Elon to start OpenAI with other people
I think if investors/CEOs/automakers had known how it was going to turn out, and how much money they were going to lose 10 years later, they might not have jumped on the FOMO train
But it turns out that AI is a plausible "magic box" that you extrapolate all sorts of economic consequences from
(on the other hand, hype cycles aren't necessarily bad; they're probably necessary to get things done. But I also think this one is masking the fact that software is getting worse and more user hostile at the same time. Probably one of the best ways to increase AI adoption is to make the underlying software more user hostile.)
[1] I think even Apple did some kind of self-driving car thing at one point.
Apple car project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project
>From 2014 until 2024, Apple undertook a research and development effort to develop an electric and self-driving car,[1] codenamed "Project Titan".[2][3] Apple never openly discussed any of its automotive research,[4] but around 5,000 employees were reported to be working on the project as of 2018.[5] In May 2018, Apple reportedly partnered with Volkswagen to produce an autonomous employee shuttle van based on the T6 Transporter commercial vehicle platform.[6] In August 2018, the BBC reported that Apple had 66 road-registered driverless cars, with 111 drivers registered to operate those cars.[7] In 2020, it was believed that Apple was still working on self-driving related hardware, software and service as a potential product, instead of actual Apple-branded cars.[8] In December 2020, Reuters reported that Apple was planning on a possible launch date of 2024,[9] but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed it would not be launched before 2025 and might not be launched until 2028 or later.[10]
In February 2024, Apple executives canceled their plans to release the autonomous electric vehicle, instead shifting resources on the project to the company's generative artificial intelligence efforts.[11][12] The project had reportedly cost the company over $1 billion per year, with other parts of Apple collaborating and costing hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spend. Additionally, over 600 employees were laid off due to the cancellation of the project.[13]
Also, I think Hacker News mostly believed the hype about self-driving cars, with relatively little pushback. Many people were influenced by what the CEOs/investors said, and of course the prospect of jobs and "cool tech"
e.g. in 2018, over 7 years ago, I was simply pointing out that people like Chris Urmson (who had WORKED ON self-driving for decades) and Bill Gurley said self-driving would take 25+ years to deploy (which seems totally accurate now)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353541
And I got significant pushback
Actually I remember some in-person conversations with MUCH MORE push back than that, including from some close friends.
They believed things because they were told by the media it would happen
People told me in 2018 that their 16 year old would not need to learn how to drive, etc.
Likewise, at least some people are convinced now that "coding as a job is going away" -- some people are even deathly depressed about it
Not really your main point, but Tesla self driving is quite incredible, despite what internet clickbait says. They have a clear path to full autonomy with vision-only systems.
But yeah, certainly 5-7 years behind the initial schedule. Which I guess was more of your point.
FWIW when I lived in Japan in 1968-69 it was 360 JPY to the dollar. I felt like a millionaire!
That’s what you get for making yourself dependent on profit-driven entities on a one-sided basis (namely that they have all the power and you have all the risk). Of course they will force the stuff on you that they hope will make them the most profit, up to the limit where you’d eat the switching costs and run away.
Is it really that weird that a company would speak from both sides of their mouth ? That is essentially what corporate speak is. That should be the assumed default when a major company says anything.
The other explanation is that it’s everywhere because AI pushers would like to integrate it with everything in order for it to be its most useful. Most of them don’t own your OS and your password manager, so they push it instead into a million different little places.
Doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid, annoying, and bad design, but I don’t know that outright deception is needed to explain it.
I agree, if you’ll allow me to diatribe my thoughts about why this could be (without thinking that these are my actual firm opinions);
Since right now there is an aire of competition, I would guess that these companies believe its winner-take-all, and are doing their “one monopoly to aid another” to get this market before theres another verb-leader (like chatgpt for llm, or google for search).
It could also be that they think that people won’t know how good they are until they try it, that it has to be seen to be believed. So getting people to touch it is important to them.
But, I think I agree with you, its so heavy handed that it makes me want to abandon the tools that force it on me.
The less I know about a thing the more useful an LLM seems to be. I’m working with a new-to-me enterprise code base, the LLM helps me find related (and duplicate) code. Even here it’s usefulness has an expiration date, eventually I’ll know where stuff lives and I’ll use it less and less. Life experience tells me I’m not unique and I suspect the constant cram-AI-into-the-thing is because the vendors are hoping, eventually, they’ll find a use-case for LLMs that sticks.
This is the correct way. Use the LLM dont let it become the only way you work.
Why wouldn't they do everything in their power to increase customer base?
Or they believe that people are too stupid to understand how good their product is.
They aren't really talking out of both sides, it is just all full-court-press marketing.
The critical realization to connect those two ideas is that they don't believe in what they tell you. They are telling you what _needs_ to be true for them to be geniuses.
People have been voluntarily letting Microsoft host their code for years now.
And before that they posted their open source code to a centralized site that wasn't open source.
This is one of those things where of course it was going to happen. GitHub was VC funded, they were going to either exit to a big company or try to become one.
Eventually the bill was going to come due and everyone knew this. You can choose to rely on VC subsidized services but the risk is you are still dependent on them when they switch things up.
If I remember initially GitHub (before MS) was free for open source and pay for everyone else. It wasn’t an entirely new idea (source forge?) but it use git which was rising in popularity.
I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.
Oddly I used selfhosted git at an academic institution. I liked it because it was set up to use “hooks” https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks after check ins. This became much harder when we were pushed off to a commercial host ( gitlab a git hub competitor)
> I think GitHub added the “pull request” as a really useful add on to git and that really made it take off.
Personally, I remember the initial selling point of GitHub being that it was more "social" than any other forges at the time, since we were all wrapped up in the Web 2.0 hype and what not. I think they pushed that on their landing page back in the day too.
It was basically Twitter but redone specifically for developers, and focus on code rather than random thoughts.
Honestly that sounds kinda neat and I guess you can see traces of that idea today: I have a million unread GitHub notifications about things I don’t care about
I have been paying them a monthly fee for private repositories for as long as I can remember.
Wasn't GitHub initially bootstrapped?
Yes, there was a couple of years we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS, but then they took on VC investments after some years and the dream went into hiding again.
> we all believed GitHub would eventually turn into a open platform made by and for FOSS
I really don't remember it like this at all. I do remember looking for actually open source forges and choosing Gitorious, which was then bought and shutdown by GitLab (and projects were offered to be seamlessly migrated, which worked well, and somehow we ended up being hosted on an open core platform, but that's another story).
GitHub always looked like the closed platform the whole open source world somehow elected to trust for their code hosting despite being proprietary, and then there was this FOMO where if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors, which still seems to be going strong btw.
I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
> I understand their was hope that GitHub would be open sourced, but I don't think there was any reason to believe it would happen.
Yeah, I don't think me myself had good reasons beyond "They seem like the good guys who won't sell out", but I was also way younger and more naive at that point (it was like 15 years ago after all).
I think I mostly just drank the cool-aid of what you mentioned as "if you weren't on GitHub, your open source software would not find contributors". There was a lot of "We love Open Source and Open Source loves us" from GitHub that I guess was confusing to a young formative mind who wanted it to become like the projects they wanted to host. This hope was especially fueled when they started open sourcing parts of GitHub, like the Gollum stuff for rendering the wikis.
Fair enough, obviously!
I suspect many people were in a similar situation.
Even though you are right, that misses the point terribly.
It's like using Instagram or Facebook. It's not at all a matter of individual choice when all your friends are on one single platform.
Sure you can host your code anywhere, but by not using GitHub you are potentially missing out on a very vibrant community.
It's all Microsoft to blame. It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.
While Microsoft is certainly to blame, GP is also right that the problem wouldn’t exist if people hadn’t continued en masse to have their code hosted on a centralized proprietary and (since 2012) VC-funded platform in the first place.
As an aside, I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community. It’s a go-to place with network effects, but network effects doesn’t by itself imply “community”.
People will respond to incentives. They had an incentive to host their code in a place that easily let them do things that were extremely high friction before.
People aren't morally reprehensible because they prefer convenience over hardship. People like using easy things, and they like making money. This means that people will make easy things so other people will give them money. If you don't like it, make easy things that work the way you like them, run them ethically, and don't sell them to anyone.
Yeah, I said that first thing. It's right but it misses the point.
Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.
> I don’t really see GitHub as a whole as a community.
It's basically a social network on top of a source code forge. You have a profile that is individually identifiable, you can open issues and contribute to discussions on pull requests. All this can be tracked back to every individual while they collaborate and make connections while they contribute to each other. How is this not a community?
> Being VC backed isn't a deciding factor for adopting a forge. It's the community that drives adoption.
OP is arguing that VC should be a deciding factor. The “community” wouldn’t exist if people had made that a deciding factor.
A social network is not a community. It may contain many communities. GitHub has communities around projects. But GitHub as a whole isn’t a community.
Ah yes, we agree. GH itself enables many communities to emerge but it itself isn't a community.
> It bought the medium and took an entire community hostage in the process just for the sake of profit.
Counterpoint is that is what companies are supposed to do. They are made to make money, the end. The only hope against this for humans is regulation, and that has fallen off the face of the earth. It’s like humans are doomed to repeat the late 19th and early 20th century era over and over.
Tangential, but I think github's secret weapon of inertia is. . .(drumroll) github stars.
They're still seen by a lot of people as a sign of project maturity and use. My unfounded suspicion is if they all dissapeared tomorrow, people would be a lot more likely to try alternative code forges.
I've been using codeberg of late, more because of their politics than anything, but in all honesty the user experience between github/gitlab/codeberg/sourcehut/gitea is near identical.
I read this article and then looked at my Github and a few other projects and found no issues created by Copilot. As someone else has said they need to be triggered manually, so therefore it's the same sort of problem as with the Curl project bug bounty, where people would be spamming with automatically LLM generated fictional problems. In that case because there's a potential for money to be made, and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.
As far as Visual Studio Code goes, I've not really used it much but it makes sense since it's Microsoft's free editor, so you will be a product and you will be marketed to. I do use Visual Studio though, and it does show Copilot in the UI by default, but there is an option to "hide Copilot" from the UI which does what is advertised. I will probably remove my important projects from Github though, but mainly so they are not used for LLM training than anything else.
> and in the Github copilot case because I guess they're trying to contribute to open source for whatever reason.
The “whatever reason” can be to build a portfolio to apply for jobs. Or worse, to more quickly build trust to exploit vulnerable projects.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/04/why-powerful-but-hard-to...
Yeah, as a maintainer with fairly popular projects (at least more popular than any project from the linked issue reporters, I’ve checked), I’ve gotten exactly zero Copilot issue or PR. As for useless review comments, lol, nothing beats useless comments from users (+1, entitled complaints, random driveby review approvals serving god knows what purpose, etc.), you probably shouldn’t be doing open source if you’re annoyed by useless comments.
And good luck stopping people from pasting from ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever. Those are free, unlike Copilot agent PRs which cost money, which is part of why I don’t see any.
I guess some people just have too much time and will happily waste on useless complaints.
Same experience. Does anyone have info on this discrepancy in observations?
I read this article after it was shared on social media by the Codeberg.org account so I though it was a PR piece, as it doesn't mention self hosting at all, just moving to another hosted platform.
How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?
It wasn't critical at that time.
But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
It's easy to knee jerk on HN but let's try to do better than this.
When Microsoft bought GH it was already the most popular forge by far, which is why it was bought in the first place.
> But then who made it critical over the intervening years? That's on us.
That's blaming the victim. The vast majority of the opensource projects were hosted on GH since before Microsoft's acquisition. I remember back in 2018 when my team made the decision to move from bitbucket to GitHub, the main consideration was the platform quality but also the community we were getting access to.
Not me.
GitHub isn’t critical infrastructure, it’s only real USP is network effects.
If outages make headlines and stop whole companies in their tracks worldwide, that’s critical infrastructure, not just network effects.
> If outages [...] stop whole companies in their tracks
They should fucking learn how to code because no one in their right mind would depend on such an external service that can be easily replaced by cloning repos locally or using proxies like Artifactory. Even worse when you know that Microsoft is behind it.
Yes, most companies don't have good practices and suck at maintaining a basic infrastructure, but it doesn't mean GitHub is the center of the internet. It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
> It's only a stupid git server with PRs.
I feel like you’re missing a few features here
Gotta love the genius of creating a single point of failure out of a distributed (version control) system...
There is no law against that, so I'm not sure what you're suggesting.
And git lives on regardless of GitHub
> There is no law against that
Regulators can (and do) stop purchases which can be considered harmful to consumers. Just look at the Adobe/Figma deal.
No, Adobe/Figma was stopped because it would severely reduce competition in a market where there are already very few relevant players. That's all they can block.
Not in the USA. Doing things for the benefit of consumers is anti-American.
If GitHub were to close tomorrow, you'd lose out on the social part temporarily, but there are effectively dozens of providers and solutions that could replace it.
The same could not be said for Figma, where if lost, you'd end up looking at the company that tried to buy it. That's what those laws are for.
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
They used Emojis and printed "Microsoft <3 Open Source" on posters for conferences, so clearly they really had changed...
How on earth did anyone believe Microsoft was different this time?
There's a whole generation on HN who came up after Microsoft's worst phase, and have spent the last five years defending MS on this very forum.
They're convinced that any bad thing Microsoft does is a "boomer" grudge, and will defend MS to the end.
I hope I'm never so weak-minded that I tie my identity and allegiance to a trillion-dollar company. Or any company that I haven't founded, for that matter.
Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase? Or has Microsoft turned it into critical infrastructure?
Even though Git is decentralised, people like having a simple client-server model for version control. So with Github being the most funded free Git hosting service it grew to being the biggest. They also built out the extra services on top of git hosting, the issue tracker, CI/CD, discussion board, integrated wiki, github-pages, etc.
I would say all of those things were present before the acquisition, enough that Microsoft itself started to use the site for its own open source code hosting.
If you travel back to 2018 and ask random software engineers "are git and github developed and owned by the same company", a fair number of them would say yes, just like today.
> Was GitHub really critical at time of purchase?
Do you think they would have bought it otherwise? Same for NPM, they got bought for huge sums of money because they were "critical" already.
It was the leading git storage at the time of acquisition, for many people synonymous with git itself
Who would disallow them to do so?
"Critical"? "Infrastructure"? What do you think Github is?
Critical piece of tech infrastructure. Which is absolutely is.
When GitHub goes down, the company I work at is pretty much kneecapped for the duration of the outage. If you’re in the middle of a PR, waiting for GitHub actions, doing work in a codespace, or just need to pull/fetch/push changes before you can work, you’re just stuck!
Among other things, a CDN. If it were to take a sustained outage, lots of important online systems would stop working shortly thereafter. And I’m not talking about developer tools; bigger sites/apps than you think are reliant on GH being up. Stupid to do that, sure, but widespread.
I've had an ongoing support ticket with GH for several months now asking them to actually disable Copilot, as there is Copilot all over and it's clear from inlined JSON on github.com pages when signed in that my account is actually opted in to Copilot features despite Settings page saying features should be disabled. I've never ever opted in to anything related to GH AI and am not a vscode user.
They keep closing the ticket and saying it's "with the engineering team". I keep reopening and asking for resolution, escalation, or progress.
GitHub did have working and professional support in the past but in 2025 they are just malicious.
It's surreal.
Do you have an example of "inlined JSON on github.com pages"? I can't imagine what this looks like.
Not near an account right now but literally just "View Source" when signed in and search for "copilot" and it's there along some other feature-flags for the user in a JSON blob inside a script tag.
Please point to the ticket so we can add to your voice.
> The second most popular discussion – where popularity is measured in upvotes – is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews.
From the discussion:
> Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories
> ... This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects' code of conduct¹.
> Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the "copilot" bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the "copilot" bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased "copilot" so that it is exempt from the block feature.
How does one see that a user, e.g. "chickenpants" submitted an issue or PR that was generated by "Copilot"? Isn't there only one creator?
Github is my push --mirror location, nothing more. Main is a popular Gitlab instance gitgud.io, and I host my own secondary mirror.
Gitlab is of course adding more AI and corpo garbage, and once they prevent disabling these "features" on community editions we'll see a fork of gitlab, probably.
The assertion that github is some bustling hub of opportunity is a strange one. At best you get people more likely to contribute because they already signed up, and a contribution from somebody not willing to sign up to another free service or simply email you an issue report is a contribution worth missing.
I think it’s mostly people around the JS/Go/Rust ecosystems that tend to be vocal about GitHub being a community. For a lot of projects I couldn’t care less if it was just cgit or gitea.
It’s quite easy to setup git to send patch via email. And you can always use a pastebin to host the diff if you’re sharing ideas. Bit I guess that’s not as visible as the GitHub dashboard.
I'm getting quite sick of how it is forced on you. It's not just yet-another useful feature, they are shoveling it into everything, and giving it the most prominent place possible.
I don't want AI getting in the way on Github. I don't want an unremovable AI button in my Office 365 mail client. I don't want to get nagging AI popups every. single. time. I open the GCP console.
A year or two I was ambivalent about AI, and willing to give it a try. These days? I actively hate it. Like all nagging ads: if you have to force it on me this badly, how can it be anything but complete garbage?
> During Microsoft's July 30, 2025 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub Copilot continued to exhibit strong momentum and had reached 20 million users.
Considering that they force it upon users and user cannot disable it, this sounds like a worthless metric.
I get an email every month telling me that my Copilot access has been renewed for another month. I'm probably being counted amongst those 20M users.
I could stand at the train station and yell "Cthulhu is our saviour" all day and later claim that the word of Cthulhu reached thousands of people today.
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
Ah, one of my all-time favorite Shakespeare quotes. Another is:
"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!“
My father used it frequently when we were kids. I found out decades later it was a quote from King Lear.
I don't think they tell the guy it's forced. They are at Soviet army levels of reporting, that's why you got people adding telemetry and copilot to Editor.
What is the actual rationale behind some companies literally shoving AI down people’s throats?
It’s fascinating stuff and can be very useful. Why does it have to be rammed so hard? I’ve never quite seen anything like this.
Or maybe I have. It reminds me a little of the obviously astroturfed effort to ram crypto down people’s throats. But crypto was something most people didn’t have any actual utility for. A magic tireless junior intern who had memorized the entire Internet is actually useful.
KPIs are likely the missing part of the puzzle. CEO wants AI engagement to go up, organization makes AI engagement go up.
If users don't want to engage with new AI features, the new AI features become unavoidable so that engagement goes up despite user preferences.
KPIs are a fantastic way for an organization to lose any touch with reality and can drive some truly bizarre decision-making.
Ahh, the reason we lost the Vietnam war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
"AI is the Vietnam of product management" is a blog post that almost writes itself. Not really my field so if anyone wants to take it for a spin, go ham.
Have ChatGPT write it.
Not old enough for MongoDB? Big Data?
I lived through that but it wasn’t like this. Hype isn’t the same thing as having something rammed down your throat with constant nag pop ups and dark patterns.
It's more like the pop-under era.
can someone explain to me if this is real? I run many high profile OSS projects that are all hosted on Github. I've yet to see any issues or PRs generated by AI, when PRs come in, I've never seen an AI code review pop in. I've seen maybe one or two people trying to answer discussion questions where they obviously used an LLM but that wasn't copilot, it was just individual people trying to be clever. Why am I not seeing this happen on my repos?
it's just the copilot popups that are hardcoded in vscode right now despite no extension being installed, that are very annoying and I'd like those to go away.
cant wait for the forced teams integration
Just put anybody who PRs AI slop to any repo on a big, collaborative blocklist so we can all block them and move on with our lives. They would be PRing AI slop with or without Copilot integrations anyway.
I went to https://codeberg.org/
Me too! I absolutely love it as a project, but I do miss finding and seeing the development of prihects I'm interested in there.
Any tips for finding other interesting codeberg hosted projects?
I just became a donor :)
Me too, but they host my stuff.
Corporate overreach like this happens if most open source developers no longer speak up because they want to be hired or retain their positions. They delude themselves if they think that attitude provides them any security. The opposite is the case: corporations will use the sycophants, secretly laugh about them and fire them if they have served their purpose. As in the case of the Google and Microsoft firings of Python core developers.
ctrl+shift+p > Chat: Hide AI Features
in vscode
Is this actually a real problem? Note it says "forced Copilot features" and
> the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories.
but Microsoft doesn't automatically make these issues and PRs. Users have to trigger it.
I mean, I do think you should be able to block the `copilot` user but I looked at this users repos and their most popular one has a total of 3 PRs with no Copilot ones.
I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs.
As a paid/commercial OSS maintainer, I haven't seen this from the public either. People occasionally submit low-effort PRs or issues, probably from Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, but I don't feel to bothered dealing with them. Of course, I'm fortunate enough to be paid for this.
I think it's just an unfortunate fact now in 2025 that if you look after a text box online, you're going to have to deal with AI sludge in one way or another. If you don't want to do that, close the text box.
> Is this actually a real problem?
I mean if Microsoft is "training" on your source code without consent (and potentially violating licenses) , that is a huge problem.
> I also checked the Rust compiler which is obviously waaaay more popular and it appears to have had zero copilot PRs
How do you asess whether some PR was made by an AI(like the user did)?
I recently got access to the premium version through work and was able to prototype something super legit in a language I don't really code in. It requires a heavy understanding of Linux and I had to rephrase my prompts in a "high level" way. However the result would have taken weeks and I was able to do it in a few days.
That said I would have a hard time justifying paying for it for my personal life because it's really that expensive. I look forward to 10 years from now when the local ML is good enough or free.