Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Today's a wild one. GitHub Copilot started injecting ads into pull requests, then backed down after major backlash. Meanwhile, Sora is apparently struggling, and someone built a language model trained entirely on Victorian-era books. Plus a helpful tool to cut Claude's output tokens and an interactive way to learn Claude Code by doing.

🔥 Big Moves

GitHub Copilot injected ads into pull requests, then reversed course

Developers discovered that GitHub Copilot was editing promotional content directly into their pull request suggestions. The backlash was swift and loud — within hours, GitHub killed the feature. It's a good reminder that even big tech companies can misread the room spectacularly. Popular discussion on HN.
Hacker News

Sora's struggling after a year on the market

WSJ reports that OpenAI's video generation tool isn't finding traction despite being first to market. Turns out being early doesn't guarantee success when competitors catch up fast. Worth reading if you're thinking about product strategy in fast-moving AI markets.
Hacker News

🛠️ Tools & Releases

Cut Claude's output tokens with a universal claude.md file

This GitHub repo provides a reusable configuration file that makes Claude's responses more concise and token-efficient. Drop it in your project and Claude will be less chatty by default. Simple but useful if you're burning through API credits. Discussion on HN.
Hacker News

Learn Claude Code by doing, not reading

An interactive learning site that teaches you Claude Code through hands-on exercises. If you've been meaning to try Claude's coding features but don't want to wade through docs, this is a good starting point. HN discussion here.
Hacker News

Mr. Chatterbox: A language model trained entirely on Victorian-era text

Trip Venturella built a language model using only out-of-copyright books from the British Library — over 28,000 Victorian texts. It's not going to replace GPT-4, but it's a fascinating experiment in what you can train without modern data. You can run it locally with Simon's llm-mrchatterbox plugin.
Simon Willison

🎨 Things People Built

Turn a sketch into a 3D-printable pegboard with an AI agent

A developer used an AI agent to convert a hand-drawn sketch into a fully functional 3D-printed pegboard for their kid. The repo shows the whole workflow. It's a nice example of using AI for practical, one-off design tasks. Show HN discussion.
Hacker News

Today’s Sources