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VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

indrora

Comments (657)

  • rsynnott
    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 (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.
  • yankohr
    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.....
  • dmitriv
    I am the person who approved this PR and would like to acknowledge and apologize for the mistake of turning this feature on by default without sufficient upfront validation.There was no ill intent by evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code. As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI. I'll work on fixing those and meanwhile revert default to off in 1.119 update.I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions - please feel free to reach me directly (my alias @microsoft.com) or open an issue on GitHub. Happy to answer anything here as well.
  • ddkto
    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).
  • artyom
    To everyone who bought the "developer-friendly" Microsoft of VSCode fame from a few years ago: this is what they forever did, and forever will do.This company has been pulling these tricks since the early 90s.If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.
  • albert_e
    Question -- is this a general feature that detects which AI agent was used to edit your code (Claude, Codex, etc) and inserts THAT agent's name into the commit message's trailer. Or this pnly detects and inserts (Github) Copilot as a co-author?
  • dsign
    This is bad. I need to start Monday warning my team about this and installing validation hooks in our repos that catch any commits with this. We don't have a non-AI policy, but we have an "approved AI" policy due to data security, and having all your commits say "Co-Authored-by Copilot" is more or less the same as as "I ** on infosec". We also have a "short commits message" policy, and that "Co-Authored" thingy takes characters.
  • MaKey
    FYI, they changed the default of 'git.addAICoAuthor' to 'chatAndAgent' afterwards: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'
  • SwellJoe
    "Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.
  • mister_mort
    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?
  • low_tech_love
    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?
  • albert_e
    Given that there are 536 different types of "Copilot" under Microsoft umbrella, I am surprised they did not distinguish between GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Copilot here.
  • amarant
    Microsoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.
  • mrcartmeneses
    Next it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza
  • ludicrousdispla
    I wonder what sort of liability this introduces for Microsoft when their 'Co-Aauthored by Copilot' code causes harm.
  • lagniappe
    microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes ago
  • digitaltrees
    This is especially hostile to users given that courts are ruling that AI written code can’t be copyrighted.When Hotmail inserted “sent using Hotmail” in emails as a growth hack it didn’t have legal consequences. This might.
  • MkLouis
    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
  • docheinestages
    Even large companies like Anthropic and Microsoft keep pushing out features without proper code and/or product review. This has become a bottleneck in software engineering.
  • cozzyd
    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.
  • csmantle
    The PR author didn't even bother to properly capitalize their subject and add a description. What a double standard for code quality Macroslop is applying to internal vs. external contributions.
  • RandyOrion
    Wow. Just like using ungoogled-chromium instead of chrome, lineage os instead of oem android, using vscodium instead of vscode is again justified. These decisions really are the ones that I'll never regret.In addition, using the word microslop instead of microsoft is again justified, too.
  • sandeepkd
    Interestingly a product manager creates a PR with small but sort of policy change without any backstory/explanation, it gets reviewed by a single developer and merged without a single comment. The bar to make changes to a production software used by so many people has gown down considerably.
  • stodor89
    Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.
  • sedatk
    Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.
  • throwaway81523
    Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.
  • bg24
    I have been in this situation. A major driving force is some kind of a demand from the leadership to see the KPI for the AI adoption. And this unfortunately is the easiest one to implement.The other aspect is virality. I think by now the implementing team should know that most people do not appreciate Claud inserting itself into the commit message. It's the job of the team to feed that to the leadership.
  • quink
    And here I’m thinking that my text editor should have zero interaction with anything git other than as a diff viewer.lazygit is text editor agnostic and works brilliantly to give some near perfect porcelain to git specifically. And it works the same with Ghostty, Terminal, zed, VS Code, any environment I happen to be in, while saving so many keystrokes.
  • tokioyoyo
    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.
  • anon
    undefined
  • adithyassekhar
    Wow that pr itself looks amateurish. I reported this a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
  • bsuvc
    If your code is "co-authored by Copilot", does that then allow future AI to train on it without your consent?
  • adamddev1
    I'm so glad I switched to NeoVim. I've got the good LSP and auto-complete stuff, a nicer grepping experience, semantic moving and selecting with treesitter textobjects, and absolutely ZERO LLM AI stuff. (I still use LLMs outside my editor for some searching and questions, but may try to cut that down too.)Call me a Luddite, but we are up against something extra insidious with this new AI wave, and the cracks of the psychosis are starting to show.
  • b4rtaz__
    This is really bad.
  • hansmayer
    For the folks who need their IDE but w/o the slop and constant notifications, there is very good public fork called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/Not only is it free of MS "telemetry" nonsense, it is also way quieter to use, no bullshit popups for updates etc.
  • golem14
    I miss in this whole thread why this is happening. Presumably to be transparent whether code has been co-written by AI?What's in it for Microsoft?If we accept that AI can't copyright or own IP rights on something, then why? I have a sneaky suspicion that there's some lobbying in the works to overturn that ruling going forward. In the past, it was OK to build models from copyrighted data etc one might have found on the wayside. But, in the future, no such thing for you. Everything generated by the AIs will then belong (at least partly) to the megacorps (maybe THEY can co-own the copyright if the AI cannot). Nice pulling-up-the ladder if true.This could also be a move against other countries' IP position.I've seen the explanation from dimitriv [1], but I am not convinced. These markings achieve very little, as people can clearly work around it by copy-pasting code from another place, or using other companies tools, like claude code or antigravity (or, not even use the GUI)I suppose the answer might just be "don't attribute to malice ...", even if Microsoft has proven us wrong before; they generally know exactly what they are doing strategically.I guess, in a few years we will know.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmitriv#47991835
  • dang
    Recent and related:Tell HN: VS Code v1.117.0 automatically adds GitHub Copilot as your co author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353 - April 2026 (36 comments)(Looks like that one never made the front page, so we won't treat the current one as a dupe)
  • vb-8448
    So what's next ... Is this a proof for when they are going to charge you a 30% commission on your sales for products build with their tools?
  • fhn
    I've been hesitant to use Zed mostly because I didn't want to learn new key but last week, I finally jumped in and remapped to keys that I like. It works really well.
  • rwaksmunski
    Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.
  • ryan-a
    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.
  • holistio
    Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.
  • bravetraveler
    Left with no choice but to add "co-authored with man + ansible-doc" to everything now
  • ninjahawk1
    Great, here’s how to remove it from your commits:Run git commit --amendYour text editor will open. Delete the line: Co-authored-by: Github Copilot <noreply@github.com>Save and exitForce push the change: git push --force-with-lease
  • gyoridavid
    withing ONE week, Microsoft one-sidedly decided to1. increase the LLM usage by 20x in Copilot2. add rate hourly (roughly 4 hours blocks) and weekly rate limits to models use in Copilot3. introduce credit based billing where you can't roll over unused credits4. and now inserts themself to the commits as co-authorMan, I really feel like they want us to hate them
  • djoldman
    Looks like it comes into play for telemetry and here in actual commits:https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...
  • yoda7marinated
    How long do you think it will take before the Free & Pro plans start showing ads in vscode and its terminal?
  • i386
    PMs at Microsoft have incredibly bad taste
  • srikanthsastry
    Determining AI provenance is really tricky and difficult when you have so many different ways to author code. Looks like VS Code has decided that by stamping all code as AI generated, it is more likely to be right than wrong. Some PM must have declared that false negatives are a lot more dangerous than false positives when it comes to AI provenance tracking
  • KyleBerezin
    quote: "Thank you all for your feedback, professional or otherwise. Sorry about the regression. I will work on fixing this in 1.119.There is a number of issues with the Co-Author functionality:It should never have been enabled when disableAIFeatures is on. It should not add attribution to changes that were not done by AI. We need to make sure it receives a more test coverage before change the default. If you have additional (constructive) feedback, please ping me directly or open an issue."
  • cvsnraju
  • jagged-chisel
    We got a positive response just before "microsoft locked as spam": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226#event-251003...
  • ozirus
    It's all because of ridiculous performance systems of some $BIGTECH$"Here's we increased number of commits by Copilot from X to Y, %Z increase"
  • Havoc
    MS sure is making a lot of strange moves as of late
  • guluarte
    Seems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back
  • starefossen
    Changes the defaults. Does not care to provide a pull request description. Talk about hubris.
  • chrysoprace
    Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?
  • anon
    undefined
  • hparadiz
    This is why I never ever commit through the gui.
  • bytesandbits
    I thank Microsoft deeply for the forced copilot crap, almost impossible to remove, that they have put into vs code. Finally after 5 years I have deleted vs code in my Mac! that was the last piece of windows software I still had around. VS code was great years ago, until Microsoft started to push crap into it – and afaik they also made the fully open-source, telemetry-free fork difficult to use with many extensions.Really, thanks for forcing me into deleting it. turns out vim + Claude Code or codex was much better all along, it really works well for me.
  • pglevy
    Wondering what else I'm using from MS that might be at risk. <glances at TypeScript>
  • rbbydotdev
    So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
  • Animats
    Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?
  • nclin_
    It's your own fault for using anything made by microsoft at this point.
  • matt3210
    Adding anything to my commits or PRs or anything else is a deal breaker TBH
  • thombles
    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.
  • slowhadoken
    My early paranoia about corporate AI is really maturing. No one’s really laughing at me anymore either.
  • ninkendo
    > No description provided.Right because of course you wouldn’t provide an explanation for why such a change would be made.Providing zero description or background or explanation for why a change is made is probably the only thing that pisses me off as much as a pure AI-slop description of a change: your job in a PR description is to give the background for why a change is being made. Honestly, any PR which doesn’t do this should be insta-closed by policy. But it totally tracks with the level of quality I’d expect from the company in question.
  • WhereIsTheTruth
    KPI maxxing gone wrongWhat's the legality of this, does this mean you give Copilot exclusive rights to your projects?Fishy fishy
  • bakugo
    Having to scroll through 3 screens worth of giant automated comments on the linked PR before seeing any comments written by humans is the cherry on top.So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.
  • flipthefrog
    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
  • the13
    Default or mandatory gift authorship?
  • sourcegrift
    Co-authored-by iPhone
  • wutwutwat
    Does anyone happen to know, what, if any, are the ownership/copyright/intellectual property liabilities and/or rights that come from a `co-authored by copilot/claude/codex/whatever`Right now these companies are dealing with legal troubles from taking other's code/IP without honoring the license or copyright.My theory that could be a bit of stretch is; if they can eventually replace all that copyright'd code that is trained into these models with versions their agent services created during the millions of uses daily, they can train future versions on code they wrote. If they hold any ownership stake or usage rights on that code, due to those co-authored lines, which are saying "this agent and by extension the company that owns it was a part of creating this code", they effectively will have laundered the license away from the original owners and removed any way to pursue legal action because they won't even be using the stuff stolen anymore, and worse yet, if they now have their own copyright or other legal grounds due to their agents co-authoring all new code, they could start going after smaller ai companies for the same thing individuals were going after them for.I know that's a pessimistic outlook, but I feel like the co-authored lines are being placed there for more than marketing exposure. It's a commit message after all, how much could that help marketing. It's the ownership/author attribution aspect that concerns me.
  • cvsnraju
  • ulfw
    Things are getting shittier by the day. Lovely
  • coliveira
    This is not just a joke, it is a legal nightmare. You may be giving away the copyright ownership, or at least part of it, to Microsoft.
  • booleandilemma
    The day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.
  • awesome_dude
    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.
  • bborud
    Microsoft is enshittifying VS Code. I have already started looking for a lifeboat.Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.
  • gnegggh
    "microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 hours ago" :)
  • villgax
    dmitrivMS should be fired by microsoft if they wanna take ownership of this legal fiasco
  • bsuvc
    In typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.
  • szmarczak
  • nisten
    just use vscodium (opensource vscode without microsoft's spyware) stop giving an increasingly incompetent org more control over your data ppl.https://vscodium.com/Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.
  • ChrisArchitect
  • clutter55561
    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$.
  • tiberriver256
    Poor Courtney
  • alansaber
    Finally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up
  • anon
    undefined
  • ekjhgkejhgk
    Speaking of which, why does anybody use VS Code?https://vscodium.com/I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.
  • pelasaco
    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...
  • anon
    undefined
  • anon
    undefined
  • simianparrot
    ... they don't require code review by at least one other person before merging..?If this is indicative of practices over at MS these days, it explains a lot.
  • anon
    undefined
  • te_chris
    Claude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.
  • morkalork
    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"!
  • altun
    [dead]
  • mohamedabdallah
    [flagged]
  • henry2023
    [dead]
  • samagragune
    [dead]
  • samagragune
    [dead]
  • iqfareez
    [dead]
  • eddyaipt
    [dead]
  • c0balt
    Growth hacking at its best /s
  • Scarbutt
    "chat.disableAIFeatures": true
  • preommr
    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?
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0
    If you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?