the first comment "it's free, therefore not an ad" destroyed me on an entirely new level
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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I am so tired of everyone and everything trying to shove AI down my throat.
My current job’s CEO has done nothing but say we need to do nothing but AI our life to the point where they cut all our old stipends and replaced it with an AI stipend. My last job installed an AI plugin in our browser so we’d feed their llm our data. Everyone has a worthless llm chatbot that no one asked for.
I’m tired man. I’m sick of everything demanding I use this thing so they can try to replace me with it. It’s like being asked to train my replacement.
I fucking booked it from a job after about 2 months because in every fucking meeting the CTO would wax on about how great it would be once we were all replaced by robots and AI. This fucker who clawed his way into his C level position though merit, and hard work, and the same last name as the owner, and all he could do to inspire the team was tell us about how a 91 year old who lost his job to AI was saying how he would be fine. I mean, if he can find a way to be happy, we all can!
Utterly tone deaf, some of these guys, it's amazing. Had a new CEO open a meeting shortly after he started with a story about visiting an apiary (bee farm) with his family. His unironic takeaway which he shared with us, somehow missing the poignant relevance of what he was saying - "It turns out the drones just don't do very much".
It was like he intended an ice breaker with a personal anecdote, and it started out fine, but he couldn't help but just tell literally all of us how he really feels. Amazing.
Same here, my CEO and other board directors did a long video telling that we released an impressive AI feature that will change the world and they didn't even explain what the feature is. It is nothing than text summarizer that will extract relevant keywords. We already did that without LLM. Now in the company, people working on AI things are getting promotion and raises.
You should fire your ceo, and not hire a new one. It sounds like they're not adding anything of value
Replace the CEO with an LLM!
Yes, lmao. llm says feed the llm
How long until someone asks an LLM how to customize the property names of JSON and it tells them to use github copilot to that 😂
There are dotnet docs in the copilot ads.
There are ad docs in the dotnet copilot.
Get that shit out of there
I like how this forum thread has actual thoughtful and objective commentary that all point to how bad this feature is.
I mean, this user does quite eloquently raise a good point: https://github.com/dotnet/docs/issues/45996#issuecomment-2848267714
It's a single link all the way at the bottom of the page, so not really obtrusive. And given that there are people using Copilot this way, it's probably better to give them something to use docs-wise rather than leaving them to Copilot's mercy. The article linked to is also pretty much just instructions on how to do it, no real gushing about how amazing Copilot supposedly is.
@ChairmanMeow @abbadon420 isn't the whole point of copilot that you *don't* need docs to use it, though? If you're reading the docs anyway, why wouldn't you just read how to do it yourself?
Yeah I think that's why it's valuable to talk about these additions. Is mentioning LLM prompts even of any value?
But that is a separate (and imo much stronger) argument than the whole "mentioning Copilot is MS shilling for their own products"-argument.
@ChairmanMeow I think it's relevant, though — like, if we accept that the whole premise of Copilot is that it doesn't need to be documented, then you have to ask what Microsoft *were* intending to accomplish by putting it in the docs. Clearly they had *some* goal in mind and "to make people use Copilot" is the only thing I can think it could be. And if this bit of the docs exists not to help the user but to drive traffic to Copilot and that's, I mean, yeah, that's an advert disguised as a help file and it's... at best icky
I mean, that's entirely assuming that Microsoft also accepts that the use of Copilot requires no documentation. And given that Microsoft does have decades of experience dealing with users doing all kinds of dumb shit, they might not necessarily agree.
@ChairmanMeow that doesn't strike me as a particularly strong argument for directing those users to a system that will sometimes just make stuff up?
That's assuming you read it that way. I don't really read that section as "Hey go use Copilot for this". Rather as "If you're using Copilot, here's how to do it with that".
@ChairmanMeow if you're using copilot, why are you reading the docs?
Copilot isn't perfect. And sometimes you don't know that you can make Copilot do something if you don't know it exists.
@ChairmanMeow Sure, but in this scenario you already have the relevant page of documentation open in front of you, so why would you *want* to know that Copilot exists?
But that's not what the section does, it highlights how to use what is being documented with Copilot, in case you're not sure how to prompt it correctly.
@ChairmanMeow ok, but again,
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There is no reason to ask copilot to do this relatively simple task if you have the docs open in front of you
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If you have to look up instructions for how to prompt copilot to do something then there is no reason for copilot to exist
Just give me one realistic scenario where this information helps someone other than Microsoft's KPI tracking executives
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Perhaps true, the value of LLM prompting instructions are probably limited.
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I disagree with the premise that requiring instructions on how to prompt Copilot for something eliminates the reason for Copilot to exist. Copilot is a tool and just like any other tool it may require some instructions for someone who is new to it. You and I might find it intuitive, but Joe Shmo might not.
@ChairmanMeow the interface for copilot is "you ask it to do a thing in plain language and it (sometimes) does it", I'm sure joe shmoe is more than capable of handling that
You'd be surprised...
I'd say a much better point is raised by this comment.
Dotnet Foundation's whole point is to be independent from Microsoft. Why is it then pushing it's AI slop? Even if we take the point of "there are people using it", then why doesn't it talk about JetBrains and their AI, or Claude?
That GitHub comment makes my brain hurt and gives me Microsoft community forum advisor (run ChEcKDiSK tO mAYbe fIX tHe ProBLem) and "leave the multi-billion dollar company alone" vibes.
Also it's not a single line - when looking at the source file - and a complete section instead.
GitHub Copilot, as used in the documentation here, is free and integrated into the IDE.
- It's inside the dotnet Docs. dotnet has nothing to do with an IDE. You can code/run dotnet code in any editor or terminal if you like.
- This person assumes that Visual Studio is the only IDE for dotnet. Looks like they never heard of Rider or VS Code or anything else.
I do not think that you can call it an ad if it is for a free tool.
WTF is he defining as an ad? "Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service". The whole section is bascially "Hey you can use Copilot to do this" - that's an ad right there.
Even if you interpret this as encouraging users to pay
Makes no sense. Does this person think ad = you have to pay for it???
it is hardly the first time that dotnet documentation guides users towards paid Microsoft products: are we going to start complaining about all pages with references to Azure next?
- A deployment target is not the same as "AI"
- If a page/section is not named like "How to deploy example app to Azure" then it shouldn't contain any reference to Azure. And yes you should complain about such stuff if it exists.
The only part of this I actually object to is that I don't think that what essentially amounts to 'prompt an LLM' belongs in documentation, although at the very least the page does disclose that the output may be erroneous.
That's basically what the whole issue is about. WTF are you even talking about then? Just shut up and give an upvote.
Overall a totally useless comment.
Also it's not a single line - when looking at the source file - and a complete section instead.
True, I misjudged the original screenshot at the top of the thread. Still, it is all the way at the bottom of the page.
- It's inside the dotnet Docs. dotnet has nothing to do with an IDE. You can code/run dotnet code in any editor or terminal if you like.
- This person assumes that Visual Studio is the only IDE for dotnet. Looks like they never heard of Rider or VS Code or anything else.
This seems a bit harsh. The dotnet docs have tons of examples where it's shown how to do something in VS Studio or VSCode. "How to use dotnet feature X in product Y" doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to include in your docs, especially with Microsoft having developed both.
WTF is he defining as an ad? "Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service". The whole section is bascially "Hey you can use Copilot to do this" - that's an ad right there.
Again I think you're being too harsh here. Not every mention of a product is necessarily an ad. The dotnet docs aren't an ad for dotnet for example. Given that this section is at the bottom of the page, doesn't demand any attention from the user and doesn't really seem like a direction for the user to start using Copilot, I find it hard to really consider it a proper advertisement. It's not saying "Hey you can use Copilot to do this", it's saying "If you want to use this with Copilot, here's how to do so". It makes no effort in convincing the reader that they should use Copilot, it's just instructions for those who already do use it.
There's also plenty of other places where the dotnet docs refer to non-dotnet products, e.g. this page on deep learning: https://github.com/dotnet/docs/blob/main/docs/machine-learning/deep-learning-overview.md
It mentions other products like Tensorflow and ONNX there. Are these mentions also ads?
- A deployment target is not the same as "AI"
- If a page/section is not named like "How to deploy example app to Azure" then it shouldn't contain any reference to Azure. And yes you should complain about such stuff if it exists.
Plenty of the how-to guides end with "and here's how to deploy your stuff to Azure!". The dotnet docs even have an entire section on Azure, a service that has very little if nothing to do with how dotnet works. But it's still mentioned and documented in the dotnet docs, because it can be useful information for dotnet developers.
That's basically what the whole issue is about. WTF are you even talking about then? Just shut up and give an upvote.
They're referring to how they don't find it useful info, but other people who do use Copilot more intensively might find it useful. It's also a completely different point: the creator of the issue objects to the docs section because they consider it an ad for Copilot. The comment author disagrees, but says they'd rather see it removed because it's just not that useful information, though acknowledging that they might not be the target audience. It's a different argument that does contribute to the discussion imo.
I also feel this is reasonable too, but the votes don’t agree.
I disagree so much with the "But it's free argument". Consider the millions YouTube videos with ads to free to play games. Would you consider them to be ad-free videos? And that's ignoring that Copilot isn't even free (either pay with data or with a subscription model)
Fuck. Copilot is going to add ads to everything.
Videos, links, random paragraphs. Everything written by a llm will feature 3rd party ads. Taking a page from malware developers, there will be innocuous libraries added that will later morph.
Eventually, we will stop writing software as llms will be all software. Serving ads. Serving you to advertisers.
"Hey watch, what time is it?"
"Time for a sugar snack. Just go to the counter, it is already paid for (by you)."
There are copilot ads in the dotnet docs.
Thanks, fixed. Sorry, I'm still sleepy.
(isn't there still an extra "for" ?😅)
yes, there was
Shouldn't documentation be accurate? By including AI in documentation, which is (as legally disclaimed) inaccurate, isn't that a conflict of interest?
I don't think this is about AI writing documentation.
~~Looks more like there are copilot ads in .NET docs.~~
Edit: should have reloaded the page before posting the comment
Fixed