Micro-Slop: After injecting Copilot into nearly every software product and service it could, Microsoft has reportedly begun rolling back some of its most disruptive AI-related changes. Now, a new "AI slop" case highlights how the cloud company may ultimately fail to win users' trust back.

A recent pull request effectively turned Copilot into a "co-author" for every programming project created in Visual Studio Code – even when the programmer behind the screen did not use Copilot at all. Users informed Microsoft that they did not like the change, criticizing the company for adding more "slop" to its increasingly invasive enshittification machine.

The original pull request set Copilot to be automatically listed as a co-author on code projects, enabling the change for all VS Code users. Many programmers left clearly negative comments on the PR, warning that it could have disruptive consequences in both personal and production coding environments.

Every commit made through VS Code would now be attributed as co-created by Copilot. The AI was even listed as a co-developer for users who had not enabled any AI features, including those who had disabled the chatbot via the "chat.disableAIFeatures" setting. One commenter suggested the change would likely help Microsoft boost Copilot engagement metrics – whether or not users wanted it.

The PR was reviewed and approved by Dmitriy Vasyura, Microsoft's principal software engineer working on the VS Code project. Visual Studio Code is a free, cross-platform integrated development environment based on Microsoft's Visual Studio ecosystem and is available on all major desktop operating systems.

Earlier this week, Vasyura shared an update on the "co-authored by Copilot" issue. The Microsoft engineer said the forced co-authorship resulted from a bug in the code that Redmond employees did not encounter in their testing environment. The default AI attribution was eventually disabled, but is now returning in a different – hopefully less disruptive – form.

A fully updated version of VS Code will soon add Copilot attribution only when AI-related changes are made to a project's code. Users will be required to provide explicit consent, and the attribution message itself may also change.

Even so, VS Code users continue to express dissatisfaction with how Microsoft handles developers and custom IDE configurations. One user called the "it was a bug" explanation "utterly ridiculous," arguing that Microsoft has been integrating Copilot across its products for years. The company recently presented a controversial adjustment in its Copilot integration strategy for Windows 11, while also introducing new "vibe working" features in productivity applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Critics question whether Microsoft is being fully transparent about its intentions, while users continue to experience the effects of rapid AI integration across its ecosystem. Copilot is increasingly present in development environments, including VS Code and GitHub, sometimes in ways users describe as intrusive or unexpected.