It Would Be Nice if the "Disable Torment Nexus" Button Actually Disabled the Torment Nexus

Let's play a game of "Spot the Pattern".

Grubhub is a website that one can use to purchase food. It is a hub of grub.

StubHub is a website that one can use to purchase tickets to entertainment events. It is a hub of tickets that will (abstractly) become ticket stubs.

Pornhub is a website that one can use to watch porn. It is a hub of porn.

So if Git is distributed version control software, then GitHub would be...

...the hub of an AI-powered developer platform?

One would probably expect that a website called GitHub would advertise itself as a hub for Git, right? I guess not.

Anyway, now that we are past that totally unrelated narrative hook, let's talk about a frustrating encounter I had yesterday evening. So I am on GitHub looking at the issue tracker on one of my public repositories, and I notice this new "Development" section on the right hand side of the page with a button that says "Code with agent mode". So I look into what this "Code with agent mode" button means, and apparently the button is for the GitHub Copilot coding agent, some AI coding tool that is now in preview.

Screenshot of the GitHub issue with a red box drawn around the "Development" section of the page. Within that development section, there is a button that says "Code with agent mode".

Now I personally do not want AI anywhere near my open source work. I think that AI in its current form is a net-negative for humanity, and I do not want any AI features enabled on a platform that I use strictly for version control and issue tracking. So I am searching for a way to disable this "Code with agent mode" button and I notice there is a "Copilot settings" button under the GitHub profile dropdown.

I click that button and am taken to a GitHub Copilot settings menu with a "Show Copilot" setting that I can set to "Disabled".

Settings menu with a "Show Copilot" setting featuring the setting description "Enable Copilot for all GitHub features, including navigation bar, search, and dashboard. When disabled, Copilot will be hidden and unavailable. This setting does not apply to Copilot search on GitHub Docs." The options for the setting are "Enabled" and "Disabled", of which "Disabled" is currently selected.

Great, so this will disable that "Code with agent mode" button, right? That button in the repository issue tracker is for the GitHub Copilot coding agent, and I just updated a setting to disable showing Copilot features. Well no, the "Code with agent mode" button was still on the issue tracker! What the heck?!

Actually, this is half bad GitHub UX and half my fault. On the left hand side of the settings page, the Copilot settings section actually has two sub-menus, "Features" and "Coding agent". By default, navigating to "Copilot settings" takes you to "Features". On my laptop, those two sub-menus are off-screen without scrolling, and it was not obvious that there were two separate settings pages. Anyway, navigating to that other "Coding agent" settings page, I see another setting "Repository access" that I can set to "No repositories".

Settings menu with a "Repository access" setting featuring the setting description "Choose which repositories Copilot coding agent should be enabled in. Copilot coding agent will only be available where it is enabled for the repository and in the Copilot license policies." The options for the setting are "No repositories" and "All repositories", and "Only selected repositories". of which "No repositories" is currently selected.

Okay so surely this must disable that "Code with agent mode" button right? That button in the repository issue tracker is for the GitHub Copilot coding agent, and I just updated a setting to restrict Copilot coding agent repository access to no repositories, which should be equivalent to disabling the Copilot coding agent in all repositories. Well no, the "Code with agent mode" button was still on the issue tracker! Again, what the heck?!

Starting in the "Coding agent" setting, "Repository access" setting is shown to be set to "No repositories" before navigating to an "Issues" page where the "Code with agent mode" button is still shown.

Maybe the "Repository access" setting is somehow still not the correct setting to disable this "Code with agent mode" button. Maybe the engineering team that implemented this feature shipped with a bug that still shows this button even when the user explicitly asks to not be shown Copilot and explicitly disables Copilot coding agent access in all repositories. Maybe nobody at GitHub decided to test this user interaction, because everyone in the organization believes GitHub Copilot is the future and no one would seriously ever turn that feature off, right?

Whatever the underlying reasons are, from my perspective as a GitHub user, this sucks. Every single day that I find myself in front of a screen, it seems nearly impossible to escape from the flood of dystopian information related to this AI hype cycle. OpenAI raises a bajillion dollars and buddies up with an Authoritarian US President, all so that ChatGPT can help a teen commit suicide. Anthropic agrees to pay 1.5 billion dollars as part of a settlement in a copyright infringement lawsuit they found themselves in while building their state-of-the-art plagiarism machine. Salesforce shows that it is "on the front lines of the AI revolution", by laying off 4,000 employees. I mean fuck even notepad.exe has a shitty "AI Features" setting section where Copilot is enabled by default!

So when I go to GitHub, a website that I would like to use as a hub for Git projects, and I am greeted with an AI slop button that does not respect my user preferences, then I am going to be upset. It would be nice if the "Disable Torment Nexus" button actually disabled the Torment Nexus.