It turns out that Microsoft redraws third-party diagrams with AI and posts them on its official page without permission
It was discovered that a third party had redrawn a diagram created over 15 years ago using AI on Microsoft's official
15+ years later, Microsoft morged my diagram » nvie.com
https://nvie.com/posts/15-years-later/
One day in February 2026, software engineer Vincent Driessen noticed his name trending on Bluesky and Hacker News. It was about a diagram he had posted on a page on Microsoft Learn, Microsoft's free online learning platform, explaining the elements of GitHub Flow.
At the time of writing, the diagram in question has been removed from the page , but can be viewed on the archive viewing service Wayback Machine.
Components of the GitHub flow - Training | Microsoft Learn
https://web.archive.org/web/20260217004204/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/introduction-to-github/3-components-of-github-flow
Below is the diagram posted by Microsoft on their official website: At first glance, it may look like a simple diagram, but there are some details that make it seem odd.
For example, at the top, there is a mysterious letter that looks like an 'm' with an extra bar written to the left of a long arrow indicating a timeline, and the arrows connecting the individual elements are also distorted.
Also, the items at the bottom of the chart include non-existent words like 'continvoucly' and 'morged.'
This chart was clearly generated by AI, and Dan Abramov, a member of the Bluesky development team, said, 'Stop using AI-generated charts. I'm not against AI, but AI isn't good at this yet.' 'AI only spits out crude approximations that aren't conceptually compressed.'
ppl should stop using ai-generated diagrams. you know i'm not anti-ai but they're just not good at this yet!
— dan ( @danabra.mov ) February 17, 2026 4:29
the problem is that diagrams have a very specific purpose: they're meant to compress understanding into few key bits. ai vomits out poor approximations that aren't conceptually compressed
[image or embed]
Another user pointed out that the AI-generated diagram posted on Microsoft's official website was based on a diagram published by Driessen more than 15 years ago.
It's even worse than that — it's a poor ripoff of a real diagram that @nvie.com created years ago for the original git flow blog post. Like, there clearly was never even the *intent* to generate a meaningful diagram, it's just sheer plagiarism
— Peter Magenheimer ( @peterjmag.bsky.social ) February 17, 2026 4:39 AM
Below is a blog post written by Driessen in 2010 about 'Successful Git Branching Models,' which includes the original diagram.
A successful Git branching model » nvie.com
https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
This is the diagram that Driessen created. It turns out that the 'm' in Microsoft's diagram, which looks like it has an increased number of bars, was a mistakenly generated 'me' from 'Time,' and the mysterious words 'continvoucly' and 'morged' were 'continuously' and 'merged,' respectively.
Driessen designed the diagram in Apple Keynote, focusing on the colors, curves, and layout. He made the source file publicly available so anyone could use the diagram, and it has since been reused in various books, lectures, blog posts, internal wikis, and YouTube videos.
'What I didn't expect was that Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, would release this imagery on their official learning portal a few years later, without any credit or link to the original,' Driessen said. 'This imitation of AI is not just ugly, it's careless, blatantly amateurish, and unambitious to say the least. It's unbecoming of Microsoft.'
'Having an AI redraw something you've carefully created and publishing it as your own is the opposite of being inspired by something and building on it, and is meaningless and disrespectful,' Driessen said. While Microsoft's plagiarism was discovered because the original diagram was well known and the generated image was sloppy, he expressed concern that similar content will continue to increase in the future.
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in AI, Web Service, Posted by log1h_ik