Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

from the comments of the article that got the most upvotes

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Microsoft’s Copilot push isn’t strategy, it’s the old embrace, extend, extinguish play dressed up in “AI” robes. GitHub was acquired to embrace developers. Copilot is the extend phase: saturating every workflow with unasked-for AI noise, from issues to pull requests to editors. The extinguish part is already visible - trust in GitHub is collapsing, and the very maintainers who underpin Microsoft’s ecosystem are moving to other platforms.

On earnings calls, this is presented as “momentum”. In reality, it’s forced adoption: a hostile takeover of developer experience. When customers explicitly ask for an off switch and leadership ignores them, that’s not innovation - it’s managerial negligence. Any competent operator knows that coercion isn’t growth, it’s decay.

GitHub’s competitive advantage was never a Copilot sidebar, it was trust and network effects. Those are finite assets, and they’re being burned for vanity metrics. The result? A platform that once symbolised collaboration now feels like adware, and developers - the same ones whose code powers Azure and every Microsoft AI demo - are signalling they’re done.

Shareholders should be asking a simple question: what is the long-term value of poisoning the well you drink from? Copilot may inflate short-term KPIs, but the cost is strategic: erosion of goodwill, flight of open-source projects, and reputational damage that no amount of AI rebranding can fix.

I agree with the first paragraph, this is just another M$ EEE. Utilizing source codes on github to train their AI to be smarter in coding. So they can promote vibe coding to people with a little or no experience in coding.

I'm not sure I understand the people in the thread advocating for the feature; they're asking Microsoft to not have features that are hostile to the users?

If the managers have decided they don't want you, and they only want vibe coders and to force AI hype on you, why would you do their job for them and try to persuade them to keep their monopoly...

Just accept that it's bad and go somewhere else; 😕 the fact that people are used to using github and that "it's what everyone uses", doesn't mean that people should stay there forever, or that Microsoft would care about the feature requests people make; stop threatening to leave or comparing github to codeberg etc, and just go create a codeberg account and start git pushing there today 🤔 (And maybe keep the github projects but only use them as mirrors for accepting PRs etc)

(I'm not saying this in a hostile way; but I really think the solution is to just go and do sth else about, it instead of trying to reason with Microsoft)