Github Discussion: Allow us to block Copilot-generated issues (and PRs) from our own repositories #159749 - eviltoast

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I find the following two news items on the front page:

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-creating-issues-with-copilot-on-github-com-is-in-public-preview/

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-19-github-copilot-coding-agent-in-public-preview/

This says to me that github will soon start allowing github users to submit issues which they did not write themselves and were machine-generated. I would consider these issues/PRs to be both a waste of my time and a violation of my projects’ code of conduct¹. Filtering out AI-generated issues/PRs will become an additional burden for me as a maintainer, wasting not only my time, but also the time of the issue submitters (who generated “AI” content I will not respond to), as well as the time of your server (which had to prepare a response I will close without response).

As I am not the only person on this website with “AI”-hostile beliefs, the most straightforward way to avoid wasting a lot of effort by literally everyone is if Github allowed accounts/repositories to have a checkbox or something blocking use of built-in Copilot tools on designated repos/all repos on the account. If we are not granted these tools, and “AI” junk submissions become a problem, I may be forced to take drastic actions such as closing issues and PRs on my repos entirely, and moving issue hosting to sites such as Codeberg which do not have these maintainer-hostile tools built directly into the website.

Note: Because it appears that both issues and PRs written this way are posted by the “copilot” bot, a straightforward way to implement this would be if users could simply block the “copilot” bot. In my testing, it appears that you have special-cased “copilot” so that it is exempt from the block feature.

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So you could satisfy my feature request by just not doing that.

¹ i don’t at this time have codes of conduct on all my projects, but i will now be adding them for purposes of barring “AI”-generated submissions Guidelines

  • johntash
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    2 days ago

    I dont remember the name of it, but there were tools that could store issues inside of git. It’d be hard to keep it in sync with everybody without a central repo, but maybe not much harder than keeping the code in sync too.