I went to https://codeberg.org/

ctrl+shift+p > Chat: Hide AI Features

in vscode

How on earth was Microsoft allowed to buy such a critical piece of tech infrastructure?

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.

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.

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.

> 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 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.

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.