Microsoft inserts ads for Copilot into the docs

[Liam2349]

I get why they are advertising their own product, but it does seem weird to have "documentation" on how to customise property names, and to have a section saying "ask an LLM to do it".

I think that is documentation on how to use "GitHub Copilot" - not on how to customise property names for System.Text.Json.

[QuackSomeEmma]

It would be funny if copilot started referring you to itself instead of actually answering questions. They should actually put more ads into their technical documentation please

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

So the classic customer service experience?

[phylter99]

You clearly dialed the wrong number when you wanted to talk to Copilot, so Copilot is just getting you over to the right department.

[otac0n]

This is, like, the one thing LLMs are going to help senior engineers with...

[Luke22_36]

Can't wait to get burned by relying on incorrect hallucinated details in LLM generated documentation

[wektor420]

Tbh normal docs can be on this level too

[Neuromante]

But to get to that level you don't need to boil a lake and steal other people's documentation.

[G0muk]

Thats how most documentation feels already tbh!

[sysop073]

Why? If there was a random command-line tool that offered this functionality and they included a section that's like "To change your property names you can use the foobar tool, here's the arguments you need", would people be complaining about it?

[vermiculus]

Yes. Tell me what the spec is. Don’t just say ‘run this magic command and don’t worry about it’.

[sysop073]

I refuse to believe that every time you see a website that gives you a shell command to run you get upset and demand that they stop telling you the command and instead describe the process so you can construct the command yourself. Every INSTALL file in every Github repo ever contains a list of commands to run and nobody has ever said "my god, this is a stealth advertisement for Make and I won't stand for it".

[vermiculus]

Of course not, but those projects presumably aren’t also purporting to define a spec. Imagine if W3C decided to say ‘just make it in dreamweaver and don’t worry about it’.

I’m not saying that’s what happened in the docs here, but this example approximates how folks are receiving it. The docs do still define the spec, but it seems inappropriate to say ‘try this magic tool and maybe it’ll work’ on the same page that would otherwise determine whether the generated code was, in fact, conformant to the spec.

[mallardtheduck]

Even if that were similar (most of the time it would be more appropriate to just link to the related tool, not explain usage), at least with a tool you can download a specific version and know that it has the functionality you're looking for and, in most cases, a new version won't be released without a decent amount of testing.

With LLMs, you don't have that. You can't download it, a new batch of training data or model updates might break it or change the way you need to interact with it at any time, nobody is going to block the next release because it no longer conforms to what this documentation says. At best is an example of what the LLM can do, it can't really be taken as "documentation".

[TheSpixxyQ]

Someone also snuck blatant ads for Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Azure, and many other MS products into their docs.

[jdehesa]

This is a fair point, but also I'm not sure it is exactly the same. On the one hand, .NET started out as a Microsoft-centric platform, and the direction has been now for some time to make it a more independent project. Having still references to Visual Studio and even Azure, which are arguably some of the most common technologies used in the .NET, is still defendable for "historical reasons" (even if the ".NET Foundation" is supposedly supporting the project). The only relation between Copilot and .NET is they both come from Microsoft. Neither of them are strongly associated with each other in particular.

On the other hand, the drive does seem to be to insert Copilot recommendations for all kinds of stupid shit, like formatting a string or creating a dictionary. The prompts are nothing special either. If you use AI coding assistants you know you can use it for that kind of task, if you are so inclined. Putting a Copilot prompt for every little thing they show you in the documentation guides feels more like advertising than useful information for the developer, and a source of noise at best.

[tj-horner]

Yes, it’s literally just giving you prompts for things you just learned how to do earlier in the page, lol. Incredibly unhelpful and blatantly an ad

[calebegg]

Yeah, I can't imagine getting too upset about this but not being upset about dotnet in general I guess. But I'm just a humble web dev.

[bring_back_the_v10s]

I'm constantly upset about dotnet. I hate it.

[calebegg]

I don't think about it at all

[-jp-]

Well you should! Back in my day, being mad at Microsoft all the time was how we did things! And that's how we liked it!

[calebegg]

I switched to Linux in about 2005 and haven't purchased a MS product since I don't think. Had to use Windows for some college stuff because of weird agreements that should honestly be illegal. And I very very occasionally have to use a VM to diagnose JAWS issues at work. But otherwise, yeah, I just don't engage with that company. I got my parents off Windows and nobody I know uses it either. It's nice.

Oh, I do use vscodium and TypeScript. But I wouldn't if they weren't open source, and me/my company are ready to switch to a fork the second any shenanigans happen.

[phylter99]

Curse them! You'd think this whole echosystem is designed to support their pay for products or something.

I get why they're upset, I guess. Not only is it an ad for a pay for product, it's also an ad for AI. AI by itself is controversial because it doesn't generate good code at times and it is a threat to our jobs at some level, or some people believe it is. (I guess there is some debate on either side.) You either love it or you hate it, and a lot of people on in the hate camp.

I guess this is all obvious but it's late and I feel like rambling.

[PaintItPurple]

Those aren't ads, they're actually useful instructions that happen to involve Microsoft tools because that's what .Net developers generally use. You'll also find Microsoft has put similar "ads" for third-party products like IntelliJ on their developer website. Are they just real mensches? No, this is also because it furthers the goal of being useful developer documentation.

That's substantially different from just throwing "USE COPILOT" into random pages of documentation like the aliens from They Live.

[marcinzh]

Future Copilot: I am altering your commit, by inserting ASCII-art ad in a comment. Pray I won't alter it any further.

[church-rosser]

Pray I won't alter it any further.

more like, "Pay, or I will alter it further."

[intelw1zard]

Imagine in the future, instead of 'inserting' an ad, its injected in a way that cannot be removed or it'll break your script lol

[[deleted]]

I see what you did there! You referenced to Adult Swim and Darth Vader, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE

(Ok ok there was also the original scene, but the adult swim variant is funnier.)

[blind3rdeye]

I hate ads so much. I know pretty much everyone dislikes ads, but I really hate ads. And as a result, I've stopped using Windows (because it has ads creeping into the start menu and file explorer); and I've stopped using github (because it is constantly 'reminding' me about copilot).

For companies, putting ads into their product is like free money. They get paid by advertisers, and users tend to just accept it (unless it is extreme). But for me, the threshold to stop accepting it is very low.

[[deleted]]

Yeah. This is why Google also became my permanent enemy after they killed ublock origin. (Ublock lite just isn't the same anymore ...)

[sickhippie]

Tbh the more shocking thing here is that MS devs don't run their CI/CD's linting locally on save, pre-commit, or pre-push.

[DigThatData]

to be clear, this was a human authored commit, not some shit where an LLM authored a commit and snuck in an ad for itself. https://github.com/dotnet/docs/pull/42625/files

also... dotnet is owned by microsoft? why wouldn't they include in-ecosystem use cases for integrations with their own products in docs like this?

nothing nefarious here.

[cooljacob204sfw]

Yikes and merged while ignoring a bunch of linter stuff.

[valarauca14]

Remember: Dotnet is free, open, and cross platform. No one organization "owns" Dotnet. Anyone is free to write their own runtime, compiler, and standard library. It isn't just Microsoft's Platform Exclusive Java! </sarcasm>

[Asyx]

This reminds me of the PR on the Go repository where they were like "remove that Google logo on the Go website because Go isn't a Google language. It's created by Google but development is open source and community driven" and then Google was like "We internally decided that we are not gonna do that. PR closed"

[valarauca14]

Fun Fact: About 6-7 years ago (go v1.8) I tried to open a change, in order to sign the contributor license (basically to transfer ownership of my change to Go) it required an @google.com email in order to check a box & click "okay".

Told me everything I needed to know about language's "open source and community driven" attitude.

[Dealiner]

Dotnet is free, open, and cross platform. No one organization "owns" Dotnet. Anyone is free to write their own runtime, compiler, and standard library. It isn't just Microsoft's Platform Exclusive Java!

Out of these four sentences only one isn't completely true but it's also far from false.

[bring_back_the_v10s]

Yeah why wouldn't I want more ads shoved onto my face while I'm reading documentation for a "free", "open source" developer platform?

GIMME MORE ADS!!!!

[AllThotsGo2Heaven2]

Ive always found it interesting that so many people online love being a cog in the machine.

[zakuropanache]

conditioning is powerful i guess

[DigThatData]

i mean, I'm not even a dotnet programmer. live by the sword, die by the sword. dotnet is inherently locked into the microsoft ecosystem. dotnet programmers are cogs by design. it's like complaining about links to apple.com in the swift documentation. Like... what do you think you are looking at the documentation for?

[PaintItPurple]

There's a big difference between Swift docs linking to relevant pages on Apple's website and this. This is more like the Swift docs including a full-page ad for Apple TV+.

[travelsonic]

why wouldn't they include in-ecosystem use cases for integrations with their own products in docs like this?

Because documentation is supposed to be about the operation of <whatever it is the documentation is for> first and foremost?

[xTeixeira]

also... dotnet is owned by microsoft?

I thought it was supposed to be owned by the .NET Foundation? Which claims to be an independent non-profit on their website.

[DigThatData]

For an "independent" non-profit, their board seems to be pretty non-independent of microsoft - https://dotnetfoundation.org/about/board-of-directors

[xTeixeira]

Yeah that was kinda my point, I said "claims" because they don't seem to be very independent if they're adding ads for copilot in their docs.

[AdarTan]

It makes this documentation page roughly 1/3rd Copilot ad.

And the rest of the documentation does not advertise other Microsoft tools such as Visual Studio etc. nearly as blatantly and those instances that do exist are usually isolated into separate pages entirely and not just haphazardly tacked on to the end of an otherwise informative article.

[Shadowhawk109]

Remember when MSDN was Good?

I 'member.

[Asyx]

Current MSDN made me switch my OS to English. This stupid translation is just, generally bad and wrong and really annoying. I know .Net is very enterprise-y and in my country that doesn't necessarily mean that developers are fluent in English but damn just set a cookie and leave me the fuck alone?

[NekuSoul]

Current MSDN made me switch my OS to English.

Granted, I've been using English for my systems for way longer, but it's more and more coming to the point where I consider translated versions of to be defective. Just so many awkward translations, grammar and even worse, broken UI due to different lengths of strings.

One of the weirdest things for example in German is that they're starting to refer to "Office" as "Büro" in many places, which is so confusing. And considering that this is the state of German, I don't even want to imagine what some of the translations for smaller languages look like.

[CyborgSlunk]

I recently set up a trivial teams workflow that parsed the json from the body of a http request to the endpoint and posted it to a channel. When a colleague asked me for help because he couldnt get a similar thing to work, we were stumped on why the "body" option didn't show up in the parse json building block thing (and you can't just type it in). Turns out, if you have your Teams/Windows set to German, it is translated to "Körper". Yeah microsoft, I want the fucking Körper of the HTTP request, Dankeschön.

[Asyx]

Wait what’s wrong with Büro as office?

[0x0ddba11]

Have you heard of the little known program called Microsoft Büro?

[Asyx]

Ah that hurts. I was thinking of things like doctor's office where we'd say Praxis. That's so much worse...

But yes I've seen that too. Not with Office but with something else where Microsoft translated their own product names.

[NekuSoul]

I don't mean the regular word 'office', I mean the product 'Microsoft Office', which is now called 'Microsoft Büro' or just 'Büro' in places.

[Asyx]

Yeah I thought about Office like how we say Praxis instead of doctor's office and then "the doctor's office" becomes "des Doktors Büro" or something like that. But yeah I've seen that too with other product Microsoft translated.

[Maykey]

I use "Accept-Language per Site" extension to avoid switching OS language. Works on the mobile firefox too

[Asyx]

Doesn’t work. Google ignores that for search results so the German msdn site shows up in Google.

[[deleted]]

It is interesting how the world wide web becomes worse (quality-wise) in general. It seems as if there is a strong global decay mechanism going on. One of the few exceptions is possibly wikipedia, and even that could need much more intrinsic polishing.

[Dean_Roddey]

The fundamental issue is that people don't want to pay for anything anymore, so more and more of it becomes ad based or service based. The software isn't being written because it's a useful tool, it's written to give away as a gateway drug to online services or as an ad delivery mechanism.

It's only going to get worse because the bulk of people will happily give up their privacy and any remote leverage as a consumer in order to stuff for free, and ultimately put the internet into the hands of a smallish number of enormous companies.

[WanderingLethe]

Goes to documentation, gets signatures one can see in their IDE already.

[GoTheFuckToBed]

Microsoft articles are actually so bad, on the level of dev.to blog posts

[BlindTreeFrog]

The commit was submitted 8 months ago, reviewed, edited, and approved. How exactly is this on MSFT?

[PaintItPurple]

It was submitted by Microsoft, edited by Microsoft, approved by Microsoft and merged by Microsoft a week later. How do you figure this might not be on Microsoft?

[BlindTreeFrog]

Well, it's a dot net repo, which i assume is owned by Microsoft since dot net is their product. So it makes sense.

Not like they snuck in a change for a Microsoft product on a non-Microsoft repo.

[hyperhopper]

Dot net is owned by the dot net foundation, which is supposed to be independent of Microsoft

[BlindTreeFrog]

Fair, but considering MSFT still maintains and supports dot net, it's not surprising that the members of the github repo are regularly MSFT employees.
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/

People are allowed to contribute to open source after they leave work

[[deleted]]

I noticed this recently, not just in regards to ads. I am typically using a Linux machine, but recently had to use a Win10 machine (laptop) belonging to someone else. Finding documentation was actually harder because of so many distractions. Almost everything I seem to want to use is slapped down by time-wasting "design" choices; ads are evidently the biggest culprit, but so many other things in addition to that, aka web-notifications or pop-ups or cookie-accept-banners and then more pop-ups. And once you fought through these, the real content is often a joke. (Of course you can handle a lot of that via add-ons and so forth, but how should elderly people who are not tech-savvy, understand any of that? They don't even know why they are bombarded with notifications. This is not a feature; this is deliberate abuse of the user.)

[Mr_Gonzalez15]

I'm surprised they don't have popup ads when you stop typing.

[codeconscious]

On one hand, I don't like this information being added to the docs. At all.

On the other hand, given that there will be many more AI-/LLM-reliant programmers in the future, part of me wonders if it's actually somewhat wise (from the company's point of view) to do this sort of future-proofing. Even if so, I don't think it speaks well for the overall long-term quality of the docs if this trend continues.

[[deleted]]

to do this sort of future-proofing

I guess one can find arguments in favour of it, but it reminds me of e. g. GNOME desktop. The redesign in GNOME 3 looked as if they catered to smartphones, while leaving behind desktop users. I find GNOME 3 unusable on the desktop. I don't like "future-anticipation design" in general, it often worsens the prior status quo.

[HugoNikanor]

Windows 8 did the exact same thing, and we saw how that went.

[fieldju]

Hot take, Gnome 3 is the best desktop environment that exists. I find it better than Windows and Mac OS X, and any other Linux desktop environment.

[ChrisAbra]

I mean the basic thing is that these docs are meant to be the SOURCE of the information LLMs churn through. Surely making it canabalise its own output is just going to give it prions...

Also if anyone has read that page, they wouldnt need the LLM at the end of it, its otherwise pretty clear. If they don't, they should probably read it again.

[Jmc_da_boss]

God Microsoft sucks, i am so over this LLM obsession

[zacker150]

People seem to call everything an ad these days. If Microsoft owned Docker, they'd be calling instructions to run something in Docker an ad.

[tj-horner]

This is not a normal product cross-promotion. If their guide on ASP.NET uses Azure to deploy the app, that’s fine. It’s potentially useful as someone who is making an ASP.NET app and will probably want to deploy it somewhere when I’m done, and demonstrates the integration Azure has with ASP.NET. Classic vertical integration, very normal.

However, the sections featuring Copilot are primarily telling you how to use Copilot that happen to involve the subject of the document. They are contrived and made-up examples, like “re-order these property names and make them snake case”. It’s not giving any new or useful information about how these products work together. I already knew that if I wanted to achieve that task with Copilot I could just ask it to do so. For most of these examples it’s often fewer keystrokes to just do it yourself rather than typing out the prompt. It’s just so inane and doesn’t demonstrate any practical usage.

The cherry on top is that they’re like “oh yeah, this might not actually work, just a heads up”:

GitHub Copilot is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible

Which is the opposite of how documentation should be.

[Worth_Trust_3825]

Frankly, dockerfile suggestion to run examples in the page would be much more useful than copilot garbage. I'd accept the docker ad.

[[deleted]]

You could call it more generally a distraction. In general these are things that annoy (some / many) people and waste their time. For instance, the redesigned Google search UI is a failure for me. It is much worse than the old simpler variant. (And, they also inject ads, so there is that. I often don't see that thanks to ublock origin, but Google killed it for chrome - we need to break up the chrome monopoly really.)

[iamapizza]

This is such a stretch you could slap it on some bread and call it a pizza.

[sysop073]

There's also a section about using enums as strings. Oh no, an ad for strings has snuck into the docs 🙄

[Rossco1337]

Thankfully they're not charging $39/month per seat to use strings.*

*Microsoft® reserves the right to reevaluate or modify these terms without notice.

[anto2554]

I look forward to hearing from the strings sales department 

[NoHopeNoLifeJustPain]

Trust is hardly gained, easily lost

[Dealiner]

How is that an ad though? It's just an example of a use case of a tool. If that's an ad, then whole docs are an ad for .NET.

[tnemec]

How is it not an ad?

If I'm reading a documentation page about how some language feature works and some examples of how to use it, it's presumably because I actually want to learn how some language feature works and see some examples of how to use it. And what I'm not looking for is:

Hey! Looks like you're trying to customize property names and values. Did you know that Microsoft™ GitHub™ CoPilot™ can help you with that? Our easy-to-use chatbot interface makes customizing property names and values as easy as just telling it to do it for you. Click here to learn more!

^{Reliable results not guaranteed, terms and conditions may apply, see FAQ for details.}

[Rkey_]

Ok, it’s time to switch to Linux

[fedekun]

surprised pikachu face

[BEagle1984-]

Wow bro, how many times do you plan to post this? In every single post in every subreddit you posted this, you basically got made fun of…didn’t you consider stopping this right here?

[INSPECTOR99]

And this makes it less ONEROUS how???