This basically invalidates the entire premise that it was an innocent mistake. It's impossible for me to believe that you actually thought that people wouldn't care about 100% of their commits being attributed to Copilot even when it was never used. Either you're misconstruing what you caught with the testing beforehand or your entire development process is tainted, because there's no way that a non-evil corporation would see this default behavior and think that people would be fine with it. It seems far more likely you just thought you could get away with it.
this was malice or greed
I think many people agree here.
Or that it was caught but didn't surface fully before release?
A helpful governance policy here might be that anything that mutates user content without opt-in consent requires a distinct sign-off or a double sign-off. If the goal is to prevent this from happening in future.
> This seems hard for me to believe. I expect more from Microsoft.
Those are some baseless expectations given the entire company's history
The outlined story feels unfortunately very believable to me.
Teams need to push out the most number of features, and nobody stops even for a second to think about how a feature might affect other flows or other users not in the feature request.
It might have been quickly reviewed to check if the code does what it needs to do (add the coauthor note).
Do you think reviewers will think about unwanted effects, when they need get back to feeding their own poorly thought out and underspec’d features to their LLMs?
>The outlined story feels unfortunately very believable to me.
100% agree here - we seem to forget that most developers hate code reviews. I actually laughed out loud at the use of the word "discussion," it's so rare people want to get together and talk about changes. By the time the PR is up anything that stands in the way of merging and shipping is seen as a nuisance.
To my mind this whole debacle is not really the individuals fault or even the team's fault but the economic pressures that drive people into situations like this.
