Among the software developers who use Microsoft's GitHub, 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.
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.
Both of these questions, the first opened in May and the second opened a month ago, remain unanswered, despite an abundance of comments critical of generative AI and Copilot.
The author of the first, developer Andi McClure, published a similar request to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code repository in January, objecting to the reappearance of a Copilot icon in VS Code after she had uninstalled the Copilot extension.
Microsoft and GitHub, not to mention rivals like Google, have gone all-in on a technology that a sizable or at least vocal portion of their customers simply don't want. And with billions in capital expenditures to recoup, they're making it difficult to avoid.
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.
"GitHub Copilot Enterprise customers increased 75 percent quarter over quarter as companies tailor Copilot to their own codebases," said Nadella, noting that AI adoption has increased usage of GitHub over the past year.
I deeply resent that on top of Copilot seemingly training itself on my GitHub-posted code in violation of my licenses, GitHub wants me to look at (effectively) ads for this project I will never touch
"I've been for a while now filing issues in the GitHub Community feedback area when Copilot intrudes on my GitHub usage," McClure told The Register in an email. "I deeply resent that on top of Copilot seemingly training itself on my GitHub-posted code in violation of my licenses, GitHub wants me to look at (effectively) ads for this project I will never touch. If something's bothering me, I don't see a reason to stay quiet about it. I think part of how we get pushed into things we collectively don't want is because we stay quiet about it."
It's not just the burden of responding to AI slop, an ongoing issue for Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg. It's the permissionless copying and regurgitation of speculation as fact, mitigated only by small print disclaimers that generative AI may produce inaccurate results. It's also GitHub's disavowal of liability if Copilot code suggestions happen to have reproduced source code that requires attribution.
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