That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast? But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.

> That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast?

It's an ad for using CoPilot and for Raycast.

> But raycast said they didn't know about it.

If I buy a billboard that tells people to go eat at a nearby restaurant, that's ad regardless of whether or not the restaurant knows that I bought that ad.

> To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.

Raycast is a paid product. Even though they have a free tier, they only have that to get people to use and like the tool enough to pay for it. They want you to use Raycast so you use CoPilot and pay for it. It's an ad.

Anyone claiming this is just a tip is being disingenuous or is extremely naive. MS knows exactly what they're doing, this wasn't a charity offering. Now they're claiming it was a tip to save face.

Tips are also not acceptable to add to PR text. It’s like the definition of a “weed”. A “tip” in the GitHub UI would make sense. But “tips” injected into my own PR text become unwelcome ads. In any case, what may be helpful “tips” today are only a gateway to straight up paid ads tomorrow. After all, I get told all the time by adtech folks that actually, the ads and all the tracking behind them are good because aren’t I glad the ads are relevant to my interests and that I’m supporting small businesses online whose shops can only exist because of the ad infrastructure. To which I say, no, they aren’t, and that’s a lie.

Cambridge Dictionary defines and ad as: a picture, short film, song, etc. that tries to persuade people to buy a product or service

My short search really didn't bring up any definition that included the need of the product/service owner knowning that the advertising is happening.

And the message very much qualifies as trying to bring people to buy raycast (or at minimum to use it which usually want people to also pay later on).

Bet their internal "tips team" used an LLM to generate "useful tips" for their coding agent system ;)

Yup, broken windows all the way down, to put it kindly

Tips don’t include links to unassociated paid products. Call it a promotion if you prefer, it’s still an unsolicited funnel