VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
227 points by indrora 2 hours ago | 90 comments

rsynnott 37 minutes ago
One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI".

Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit, because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.

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kami23 27 minutes ago
When I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned.

Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.

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janice1999 14 minutes ago
They invested billions. They're scared.
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pjc50 32 minutes ago
The only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?
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krainboltgreene 22 minutes ago
> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.

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buzzerbetrayed 11 minutes ago
> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX

Have we been using the same Google?

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frizlab 8 minutes ago
Some people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.
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lpcvoid 34 minutes ago
AI is the ultimate grifting tool, grifters gonna grift.
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yankohr 7 minutes ago
This feels like the modern version of 'Sent from my iPhone' but much more invasive. Git commits are legal and technical records. Falsifying who authored a piece of code just to pump up AI usage stats is a huge breach of trust and it is disappointing to see Microsoft prioritize branding over the integrity of the developer's log. I expect my IDE to record what happened, not what the marketing department wants people to think happened.....
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ddkto 23 minutes ago
The best part is that copilot commented on the PR saying that this doesn’t actually change the behaviour, creates inconsistency in the codebase and suggested reverting the change! (This comment seems to have been ignored…)

> The configuration schema default was changed to "all", but the runtime fallback in extensions/git/src/repository.ts still calls config.get('addAICoAuthor', 'off'). This is now out of sync and can lead to unexpected behavior in contexts where the contributed configuration defaults aren't loaded (e.g., some tests/hosts), and it makes the intended default unclear. Update the runtime fallback to match the schema default (or omit the fallback so the contributed default is used).

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SwellJoe 52 minutes ago
"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.
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djyde 44 minutes ago
However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.
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blaze33 34 minutes ago
Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.
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conception 6 minutes ago
100% hundreds of people do.
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frizlab 7 minutes ago
But you can see it and remove it before sending. It’s definitely not the same.
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ssl-3 36 minutes ago
That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver.

This kind of tagline marketing works best with people people who aren't even aware that they're participating, and who aren't bothered to do anything different it even if they become aware.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so the marketing remains.

  Sent from my iPhone
  Downloaded from Demonoid
  Rusty n Edie's: The world's friendliest BBS 216-726-0737
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SwellJoe 18 minutes ago
But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.
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ssl-3 6 minutes ago
I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.

But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.

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SwellJoe 26 minutes ago
Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.
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projektfu 11 minutes ago
It's the masochism of downloading images at 2400 baud.
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sunaookami 32 minutes ago
Does anybody else remember Tapatalk? They did the same with signatures in forums.
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k8sToGo 30 minutes ago
Microsoft already does this with their mobile Outlook. Sent by Outlook Android / iOS on the bottom of the message.
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mister_mort 32 minutes ago
This is pumping someone's metrics up inside of Microsoft, somewhere.

The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?

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k8sToGo 11 minutes ago
Isn't that someone the person who created the PR? "Product Manager at @microsoft working on VS Code and GitHub Copilot!" it says on her profile
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telchior 14 minutes ago
That someone saw Google's claim that 75% of their code is written with AI and said "hold my beer".

Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

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tokioyoyo 4 minutes ago
At no point in time companies were so desperate for developer attention. It feels like the general consensus is it is a “winner takes it all” race, and everyone has to add as many dark patterns as possible to increase stickiness.
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MkLouis 20 minutes ago
Jeez, you can see many things wrong with this new all-in AI direction that Microsoft is taking. Commit by a product manager, who probably actually never digged through the code before…automated ai review not catching the problem, and the vibe codes pr introduction the error itself
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chrysoprace 2 minutes ago
Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?
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sedatk 29 minutes ago
Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.
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dawnerd 2 minutes ago
It was in their patch notes as being added too although they mention it being opt in
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snehesht 25 minutes ago
To be precise,

"git.addAICoAuthor": "off"

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amarant 34 minutes ago
Microsoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.
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dd8601fn 14 minutes ago
I know you didn’t mean it that way, but boy did that make me feel old.

Anyone else remember the bill gates borg category on slashdot?

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willhslade 6 minutes ago
Indeed fellow traveller. I do.
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ryan-a 5 minutes ago
Time to leave for something else if you haven't already, vscode has been good to us but this kind of behavior is only going to ramp up as Microsoft seeks to get a return on their AI investments.
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mrcartmeneses 54 minutes ago
Next it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza
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Qem 16 minutes ago
Next Microsoft will sue you to get a share of revenues and ownership as co-author, if your product ever makes success.
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k8sToGo 29 minutes ago
But only if you watched this 1 min Segment of today's sponsor...

Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer

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IdontKnowRust 24 minutes ago
This will be so true hahaha
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dessimus 45 minutes ago
More like Carl's Jr.: Fuck you! We're eating.
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cozzyd 37 minutes ago
My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.
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flipthefrog 11 minutes ago
A lot of bitching about Microsoft here, for something Claude has been doing forever. I have a git hook that rejects any commit containing the line Co-authored by Claude
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vultour 35 seconds ago
Are you ashamed of other people finding out you used Claude? I think the co-authored-by bit should not be a setting at all, AI-generated code should be clearly identified.
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qezz 6 minutes ago
That's a fair point, but claude code is not an editor (yet?), and when you use claude code, and allow it to commit things, it's almost certainly "co-authored by llm".

Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.

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kafrofrite 10 minutes ago
Please do share
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stodor89 30 minutes ago
Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.
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throwaway81523 41 minutes ago
Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.
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holistio 47 minutes ago
Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.
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yNeolh 34 minutes ago
That happens in most speech to text systems, even Superwhisper, Monologue and Wispr Flow. I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio and happens when there is silence. I guess it depends on the model but most of them are based on Whisper which has this problem
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zugi 11 minutes ago
> I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio

Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"

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rbbydotdev 9 minutes ago
So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
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b4rtaz__ 37 minutes ago
This is really bad.
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glitchc 33 minutes ago
Should be the top comment for succintly summarizing the situation.
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rwaksmunski 19 minutes ago
Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.
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ninjahawk1 35 minutes ago
Great, here’s how to remove it from your commits:

Run git commit --amend

Your text editor will open. Delete the line: Co-authored-by: Github Copilot <noreply@github.com>

Save and exit

Force push the change: git push --force-with-lease

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lpcvoid 32 minutes ago
Or people could instead not use Microslop software, easy fix for the AI bullshit. But yeah of course you're technically right.
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ninjahawk1 17 minutes ago
I like your solution better.
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Animats 49 minutes ago
Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?
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Dylan16807 28 minutes ago
If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright.

And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.

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redwall_hp 35 minutes ago
The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent.

Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop.

I can't wait for:

* The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent copyright for machine generated code.

* The first company to get nailed to the wall for reverse engineering and replicating high profile copyrighted code, like Windows.

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thombles 17 minutes ago
I saw this the other day and was pretty confused - I prefer to write my own commit messages and wondered if I’d accidentally let the AI do it this time. Nope, just MS changing things behind my back. Sigh.
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awesome_dude 42 minutes ago
I personally don't mind if an AI inserts it's "Co-Authored by" tag into commits it has worked on - it's transparency, I used its help and it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad.

But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.

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vunuxodo 10 minutes ago
> it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad

Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.

Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.

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low_tech_love 38 minutes ago
I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?
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dlivingston 22 minutes ago
It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.
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JoshTriplett 33 minutes ago
It's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)
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Jtarii 21 minutes ago
GCC isn't making editorial decisions.
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cess11 25 minutes ago
The LLM is just a database. Would you be fine if this was done when cribbing stuff from Github, StackOverflow, tutorials and so on, or do you think some databases are more special than others in this regard, and if so, on what merit?
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te_chris 4 minutes ago
Claude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.
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clutter55561 38 minutes ago
I got tired of Claude adding their signatures to my commits against my instructions (the settings schema changed at some point), so I added a commit-msg hook that blocks multi-line commits. Easy and works like a charm, and would block this sort of M$ intrusion.

What a despicable behaviour from M$.

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pelasaco 30 minutes ago
Wasn’t it discussed here that no copyrights apply to code generated by AI? I’m asking myself whether adding "Co-authored-by: Copilot" means the code is not protected by the GPL, or even allows Microsoft to own your code...
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booleandilemma 34 minutes ago
The day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.
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morkalork 35 minutes ago
Well, that's good news for all the developers working at companies with delusional management proclaiming "100% of code will be written by AI in 6 months"!
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baal80spam 49 minutes ago
But Microsoft promised it'll be better now and will fix everything. Pinky promise!
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c0balt 50 minutes ago
Growth hacking at its best /s
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Scarbutt 42 minutes ago
"chat.disableAIFeatures": true
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2OEH8eoCRo0 46 minutes ago
If you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?
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janice1999 40 minutes ago
Moved to Zed and recommended my team do the same.
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preommr 43 minutes ago
Turn it off and rage on social media.

If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".

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glitchc 28 minutes ago
Zed currently does not have a revenue stream. Ot's only a matter of time before the same shenanigans ensue.
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janice1999 12 minutes ago
They're a commercial entity that sells AI plans and enterprise features.
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msla 5 minutes ago
Like how GNU Emacs is completely saturated with AI now?

(That's sarcasm, in case anyone wants to pretend I'm being serious.)

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Scarbutt 31 minutes ago
Unfortunately, Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish, Microsoft supported LSPs just work better in VSCode, they are better integrated, and Zed can't do anything about LSPs memory or peformance.
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ElFitz 21 minutes ago
> Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish

One could think that. But VSCode is the one that occasionally failed to simply render text.

No idea what happened these handful of times, but the UI was just completely screwed up, as if it were one of these "scratch to reveal" games, but with the file’s content (and unresponsive, obviously).

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throwaway91723 38 minutes ago
[dead]
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preommr 45 minutes ago
I really hope the editor wars don't start again. I've been happily using VsCode for years now. More than happy in fact, it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used, as evidenced by how AI companies basically started as a VsCode fork.

But this is going full-throttle on enshittification.

WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?

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glitchc 31 minutes ago
The editor wars never ended, and VSCode has been user hostile since inception. It came with unavoidable telemetry right out the gate.
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majormajor 40 minutes ago
> WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?

"Make a great free product so that we can enshittify it later" is an infamous MS playbook. Maybe nothing happened, maybe just the usual MS at work.

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opan 22 minutes ago
vim and emacs are both still great choices.
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low_tech_love 34 minutes ago
Isn’t this a kind of “leopards ate my face” situation? I thought we had all “agreed” that letting AI write code and take control of software repositories is good, even if we have no idea what is going on beyond a thin surface layer, because well it’s fast and we can fix it later and lol who needs testing? My customers are my testers.

And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?

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