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VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
- zhouquanxi 5mo ago[flagged]
- 1domain 5mo agosounds interesting
- ulfw 5mo agoThings are getting shittier by the day. Lovely
- bsuvc 5mo agoIn typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.
- 3eb7988a1663 5mo agoI love a good dog-pile, but there is little constructive happening in that thread beyond variations of, "WTF?".
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- mrcartmeneses 5mo agoNext it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza
- dessimus 5mo agoMore like Carl's Jr.: Fuck you! We're eating.
- k8sToGo 5mo agoBut only if you watched this 1 min Segment of today's sponsor... Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer
- IdontKnowRust 5mo agoThis will be so true hahaha
- Qem 5mo agoNext Microsoft will sue you to get a share of revenues and ownership as co-author, if your product ever makes success.
- yuye 5mo agoPlease verify that you are pushing to branch 'master' by saying "Doritos™ Dew™ it right!" ERROR! Merge conflict. Please drink a verification can.
- SwellJoe 5mo ago"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.
- djyde 5mo agoHowever, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.
- blaze33 5mo agoSomeone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.
- conception 5mo ago100% hundreds of people do.
- manquer 5mo agoDoubly so, because you are being used as ad-channel and not being compensated for it either.
- ssl-3 5mo agoThat'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
- SwellJoe 5mo agoDang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.
- c0balt 5mo agoGrowth hacking at its best /s
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Animats 5mo agoDoes that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?
- redwall_hp 5mo agoThe 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.
- circuit10 5mo agoHaving a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either "Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated
- Dylan16807 5mo agoIf 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.
- lelanthran 5mo ago> If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?
- Dylan16807 5mo agoThe bot (and therefore microsoft) doesn't get any copyright at all.
- holistio 5mo agoWhenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.
- yNeolh 5mo agoThat 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
- zugi 5mo ago> I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ikidd 5mo ago"Smash that Like button."
- mr-wendel 5mo agoHa, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5mo agoIf you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?
- preommr 5mo agoTurn it off and rage on social media. If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".
- Scarbutt 5mo agoUnfortunately, 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.
- TeriyakiBomb 5mo agoI'm rooting for Zed but it does feel quite underbaked still right now.
- ElFitz 5mo 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).
- sieve 5mo agoI tried VSCode some years ago (immediately moved to Codium) and yes, it is extremely well-done for what it is. But Zed is good enough for me. Everything I care about for Python, TS/JS/CSS and C programming is available. I do not even miss the JetBrains tooling for these.
- throwaway91723 5mo ago[dead]
- preommr 5mo agoI 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?
- glitchc 5mo agoThe editor wars never ended, and VSCode has been user hostile since inception. It came with unavoidable telemetry right out the gate.
- RandyOrion 5mo agoYeah, this is part of the reason why vscodium exists.
- majormajor 5mo 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.
- opan 5mo agovim and emacs are both still great choices.
- marshray 5mo agoI've been using *nix and usenet since the early 1990's. I always thought "editor wars" was a particularly dumb in-joke among a small group and I feel sad when I see people who think it was ever more than that. The Wikipedia page cites "The Jargon File" as an authoritative source of truth. Ridiculous.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Scarbutt 5mo ago"chat.disableAIFeatures": true
- RevEng 5mo agoNot sufficient. See the GitHub thread. It is tagging things even when AI features are disabled.
- awesome_dude 5mo agoI 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.
- low_tech_love 5mo agoI’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?
- JoshTriplett 5mo agoIt's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)
- dlivingston 5mo agoIt'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.
- Jtarii 5mo agoGCC isn't making editorial decisions.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- cess11 5mo agoThe 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?
- 5mo ago
- throwaway81523 5mo agoWonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- clutter55561 5mo agoI 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$.
- amarant 5mo agoMicrosoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.
- dd8601fn 5mo agoI 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?
- willhslade 5mo agoIndeed fellow traveller. I do.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoThere is more of it that's going on. For me, Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard app sabotages the use of a competing search engine (DuckDuckGo) in Firefox in Android for me. When typing a multi-word double-quoted search phrase, it doesn't allow it to be typed correctly.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoDuckDuckGo is not a competitor to Bing. It is a sub-brand of Bing for the purpose of market segmentation. While Bing attracts users who install Windows and click on internet, DuckDuckGo attracts users who feel concerned about privacy. It's the same engine under the hood.
- OutOfHere 5mo agoLast I read, Microsoft pays DuckDuckGo somewhat proportional to its user count.
- b4rtaz__ 5mo agoThis is really bad.
- glitchc 5mo agoShould be the top comment for succintly summarizing the situation.
- cozzyd 5mo agoMy 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.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 5mo agoCan you explain how this works? Doesn’t this also stop you from connecting to it over ssh via vs code?
- accelbred 5mo agoSounds like a feature.
- cozzyd 5mo agoYes that's the point. If vscode didn't insist on installing potentially gigabytes of blobs then this wouldn't be necessary. (I'm a vimmer anyway... And emacs is too bloated to fit too, conveniently.)
- skydhash 5mo ago> And emacs is too bloated to fit too, conveniently. If you connect via ssh, you could use Tramp. It does not install emacs on the target, but instead use a somewhat permanent connection as a tunnel for most emacs commands (transparently). Works too with docker, podman, distrobox, etc,...
- cozzyd 5mo agoyep, it's a shame vscode doesn't do something similar and instead copies a huge runtime (evidently, multiple times?!?) onto unsuspecting hosts.
- signa11 5mo ago640k … there is something poetic about that number.
- rsynnott 5mo agoOne 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.
- buzzerbetrayed 5mo ago> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX Have we been using the same Google?
- frizlab 5mo agoSome people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.
- ninjalanternshk 5mo agoIf you had been a Yahoo user when Google launched, you’d understand.
- HeavyStorm 5mo agoWe have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.
- dwedge 5mo agoTheir search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads. Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX. Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?
- morkalork 5mo agoWell, 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"!
- ninjahawk1 5mo agoGreat, 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
- lpcvoid 5mo ago[flagged]
- ninjahawk1 5mo agoI like your solution better.
- themanualstates 5mo agoThe original commit is (publicly) preserved on Github.com until perpetuity, so I wouldn't use the term 'remove'.
- booleandilemma 5mo agoThe day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.
- baobabKoodaa 5mo agoUnfortunately zed is not a complete, finished product in the sense that VSCode is.
- low_tech_love 5mo agoIsn’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?
- tln 5mo agoThe sneaky commit modification is triggered by very modest usage of AI such as auto-completion. Look, if an agent writes the code and the commit message then adding a Co-authored-by by default is ok. Not even showing it before the commit is made is not, and adding the message when AI was just completing code is not.
- AlienRobot 5mo agoGlorified autocomplete, syntax reminder and random snippet generator thinks it's co-authoring things.
- bojan 5mo agoI genuinely think it's not ok even then. Copilot is a tool, one of many I use. That tool has no business polluting commit messages without my knowledge. The appended message isn't even adding any new information, as in this day and age a vast majority of commits is probably "co-authored" by an LLM.
- tln 5mo agoI should have been clearer, the hidden addition is never ok. If I ask Claude to write a commit message, it will inserted a co-author line (and an ad), but I can see it and disapprove, add a counter instruction to CLAUDE.md etc
- low_tech_love 5mo agoI personally don’t understand the need to treat a tool as an “author” but that’s not important, my comment is mostly regarding the backlash of what happened. A feature was rushed in and does not work as intended, in a kind of disastrous way. Now we feel like our customers do when they have to deal with all the crap that our AI co-authors push forward without the right process.
- mister_mort 5mo agoThis 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?
- telchior 5mo agoThat 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.
- liquid_thyme 5mo ago>No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up. You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s
- k8sToGo 5mo agoIsn'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
- whynotmaybe 5mo agoIsn't it also cause they want to tag those commit so that they don't feed it into copilot training?
- 650 5mo agoA Principal Software Engineer at Microslop merged this - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitriy-vasyura-9191611/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitriy-vasyura-9191611/ This is the author of the MR - https://github.com/cwebster-99 https://github.com/cwebster-99 - A Product Manager at Microslop I've routinely spoken on the uselessness, and oftentimes detriment of product managers in tech. The dearth of leadership driving for vanity metrics like PMs writing code doesn't help either.
- gopher_space 5mo agoThe role feels like it’s borne out of a desire to see employees as fungible.
- pelasaco 5mo agoWasn’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...
- stodor89 5mo agoAdding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.
- sedatk 5mo agoSearch for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.
- ddkto 5mo agoThe 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).
- brendoelfrendo 5mo agoThere are two commits in the PR, the second of the two seems to update the fallback config to avoid the inconsistency that Copilot was complaining about.
- HeavyStorm 5mo agoThat's pretty standard review practice in there by now.
- jagged-chisel 5mo agoBut it was apparently ignored.
- dlopes7 5mo agoIt wasn’t ignored, the second commit fixes what the bot suggested
- stefan_ 5mo agoI also liked the bot posting screenshot diffs that are all false positives, while apparently not capturing the default change (is it not in some menu somewhere?)
- aduwah 5mo agoConstructive feedback: revert it and then apologise instead of just doing half of it.
- MkLouis 5mo agoJeez, 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
- 650 5mo agoThis was merged by a Principal SWE though. Maybe overruled by leadership :)
- rwaksmunski 5mo agoJust when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.
- thombles 5mo agoI 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.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
- flipthefrog 5mo agoA 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
- kafrofrite 5mo agoPlease do share
- conception 5mo agoAsk claude to “Write a hook for Claude code that rejects any get commit that includes “co-authored by Claude” in it”
- bethekidyouwant 5mo agoJust ask Claude to write it..
- qezz 5mo agoThat'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.
- vultour 5mo agoAre 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.
- rbbydotdev 5mo agoSo GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
- yankohr 5mo agoThis 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.....
- polski-g 5mo agoGood point. That fake commit addendum means that the entire commit contents would not be under copyright protection. AI generated code is not currently copyrightable.
- bdangubic 5mo agoNot that simple… this is great read: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-wrote https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-w...
- bjt 5mo agoStill if you're the lawyer on the side of the lawsuit claiming that the code is copyrightable, you really don't want that copilot attribution in the commit message muddying the waters.
- bdangubic 5mo agoyou actually do, as counter-intuitive as that seems. co-authored implies (and gives you room to argue) that you were involved in the process. hiding the fact that you did if proven otherwise (not that hard to prove in many cases if it comes to that) won’t be looking good. at my work, we are mandated to include AI attribution and I would say every well-run company should have same mandate
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ryan-a 5mo agoTime 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.
- Brainspackle 5mo agoZed is looking pretty good right now
- tokioyoyo 5mo agoAt 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.
- te_chris 5mo agoClaude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.
- loufe 5mo agoThere's a large gap between what they do (same env var disables this since the beginning) vs Microsoft bucking it's way through AI coauthorship credit in a multi potential author china shop, though.
- flykespice 5mo agoThat isn't the same thing. It's you're using AI tool to code, obviously the tool should be given due credits on the commits, for ethics. but in this case Microslop is branding any commits as "co-authored by Copilot", even if the user never used any AI tool. This is blatant attempt violation of commits authorship ethics and user rights.
- te_chris 5mo agoWhat? In what world should the tool be given due credit.
- cactusplant7374 5mo ago> It's you're using AI tool to code, obviously the tool should be given due credits on the commits, for ethics. Why? Does it offend the AI if we don't? Does it change the review process if the code wasn't written by a human?
- chrysoprace 5mo agoIs this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?
- MaKey 5mo agoFYI, they changed the default of 'git.addAICoAuthor' to 'chatAndAgent' afterwards: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880 So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- dbeley 5mo agoThis should be higher, as this dates from 5 days ago I wonder why OP didn't bother to mention this follow-up
- indrora 5mo agoTo be honest, I didn't see the follow up. It just incensed me enough that they would do that to begin with. Right up there with Zed being pretty open that they siphon your code through their API surface and have a "Just Trust Us Bro" data retention policy, along with no way to turn the collaboration features off. - OP
- kevinmgranger 5mo agoWhat's this about Zed? I've been considering switching to it but I want to know more about what you mentioned.
- kllrnohj 5mo agoTo be fair to OP, that follow-up doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere in the discussion on #310226, either. They probably should have left a note about that change before locking the thread.
- nusl 5mo agoChanged back or not, this demonstrates that they're either willing to make sweeping changes like this that hurt a massive number of users, or that they're incompetent to the point of not realising the impact of the first change. They'd have had to just blindly make the change, since the original PR was approved and merged within the same minute by the original author (no additional eyes, at least that we can see), or ignore user complaints and make it anyway. Both cases demonstrate terrible stewardship of VSCode.
- ninkendo 5mo ago> 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.
- coliveira 5mo agoThis 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.
- dwedge 5mo agoAI generated code is not copyrightable anyway. The only real question is how much "copiloting" you have to get ownership, and right now the courts seem to be heading towards it not mattering if AI was involved
- bakugo 5mo agoHaving 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.
- the13 5mo agoDefault or mandatory gift authorship?
- djoldman 5mo agoLooks like it comes into play for telemetry and here in actual commits: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d49de2c554d8121a832fd3/extensions/git/src/repository.ts#L1459 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...
- alansaber 5mo agoFinally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up
- ozirus 5mo agoIt'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"
- ekjhgkejhgk 5mo agoSpeaking of which, why does anybody use VS Code? https://vscodium.com/ 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.
- artyom 5mo agoTo 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.
- cheschire 5mo agoYou may be surprised to learn some of the employed adults on this site were born after the 90’s.
- vermilingua 5mo agoAnd hopefully those employed adults have done their due diligence and read some history.
- justinclift 5mo agoUnfortunately, quite a few of these young adults ignored the people who lived through it last time and were repeatedly warning them about it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- thiht 5mo agoOk but I’ve used VSCode for almost 10 years, got mad at this once, and disabled it instantly. This sucks, but maybe don’t overreact?
- abustamam 5mo agoJust because you can opt out doesn't mean that they're not shitty for defaulting you to opt in.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
- fhn 5mo agoI'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.
- indrora 5mo agoFYI you should read Zed's FAQ on data retention. It's very "Trust Me Bro". My workplace has already banned Zed after legal review purely on the lack of any controls over the collaboration feature that gets turned on the instant that you log into Github with it.
- morgankrey 5mo agoHey, I work at Zed - happy to help or clarify anything that we're not doing a good job of laying out. What FAQ are you referring to?
- slowhadoken 5mo agoMy early paranoia about corporate AI is really maturing. No one’s really laughing at me anymore either.
- tiberriver256 5mo agoPoor Courtney
- throwaway277432 5mo agoNo personal attacks please. They're just cogs in the machine. The organization and process that enables it to get to this point is the problem. And that is MS, always has been.
- baobabKoodaa 5mo agoNo-one is responsible for their own actions? Fuck Courtney.
- KyleBerezin 5mo agoquote: "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."
- dmitriv 5mo agoAgreed, fixed disableAiFeatures in my PR: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931 Will work on making it better later.
- fastasucan 5mo agoBut it should still add the tagline when copilot has been used, without direct approval by the user?
- bborud 5mo agoMicrosoft is enshittifying VS Code. I have already started looking for a lifeboat. Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.
- iqfareez 5mo ago[dead]
- lagniappe 5mo agomicrosoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes ago
- weberer 5mo agoMany such cases.
- nisten 5mo agojust use vscodium (opensource vscode without microsoft's spyware) stop giving an increasingly incompetent org more control over your data ppl. https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/ Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.
- wutwutwat 5mo agoDoes 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.
- dmitriv 5mo agoI 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.
- nicbou 5mo ago> There was no ill intent Only callous disregard for your users > many similar tools do this as well But since we have normalised that, it’s okay?
- p-e-w 5mo agoI appreciate you acknowledging that this was a mistake, but as you surely know from your own experience with other people’s mistakes, some mistakes are so egregious that they cast doubt on the intentions of the people involved even if they are corrected later. To me, “let’s add false attribution to every commit by default without informing the user” falls squarely into that category. I don’t think I’ve ever worked in an environment where something like that wouldn’t have been red-flagged in three seconds by anyone who took even a casual glance. I’d honestly be embarrassed if such a proposal even made it into a public pull request for my organization, nevermind that pull request getting merged.
- dmitriv 5mo agoIf what you described would make it to our PR queue, it would definitely not pass the gates. The idea was to track AI-only changes and add the trailer when such changes were detected AND the setting was enabled. Obviously, we didn't want to attribute all changes to AI. There is a bug in change detection (which slipped through testing), which led to even non-AI changes being tracked. And thus we have this problem. The PR linked here wasn't even implementing the feature, it was changing the default for the setting.
- i386 5mo agoPMs at Microsoft have incredibly bad taste
- Andrex 5mo agoI mean, they chose to work for Microsoft.
- quink 5mo agoAnd 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.
- guluarte 5mo agoSeems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back
- digitaltrees 5mo agoThis 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.
- szmarczak 5mo agoSo much for their commitment to quality: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-commitment-to-windows-quality/ https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
- sourcegrift 5mo agoCo-authored-by iPhone
- eddyaipt 5mo ago[flagged]
- jagged-chisel 5mo agoWe got a positive response just before "microsoft locked as spam": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226#event-25100330987 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226#event-251003...
- bg24 5mo agoI 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.
- csmantle 5mo agoThe 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.
- vb-8448 5mo agoSo 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?
- docheinestages 5mo agoEven 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.
- andrekandre 5mo agoits a sad truth, but in the end, for companies, software is just a means to an end: more revenue and if they can get more revenue by less quality and cutting corners they will do it; see countless examples of such scandals in many industries...
- hparadiz 5mo agoThis is why I never ever commit through the gui.
- matt3210 5mo agoAdding anything to my commits or PRs or anything else is a deal breaker TBH
- bsuvc 5mo agoIf your code is "co-authored by Copilot", does that then allow future AI to train on it without your consent?
- krupan 5mo agoI have bad news for you about what current AI was trained on...
- bsuvc 5mo agoIt's not news to me. I wonder if this could be related to these recent privacy related changes. https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-github-copilot-interaction-data-usage-policy/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/updates-to-gi...
- golem14 5mo agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmitriv#47991835
- dboreham 5mo agoMost odd things can be explained by imagining who might be able to buy a new boat as a result.
- golem14 5mo agoYeah, that's what I'm saying, too. I'm just not sure how to connect the dots here.
- dmitriv 5mo agoThe change was about helping teams ensure AI-generated code is attributed in commits - nothing to do with copyrights and the like. If you don't have to take my word for it - query VS Code repo for changes and issues that went into implementing this and you will see.
- sandeepkd 5mo ago
- nclin_ 5mo agoIt's your own fault for using anything made by microsoft at this point.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoDoes this include GitHub?
- baobabKoodaa 5mo agoIt's really hard to find alternatives. Especially for VSCode.
- nclin_ 5mo agoWhat are the VSCode features you find difficult to replace? Zed is quite good as a similar workspace, but I can't speak to extensions.
- baobabKoodaa 5mo agoThis event got me to try Zed, and it didn't work properly with Jupyter Notebooks.
- adithyassekhar 5mo agoWow that pr itself looks amateurish. I reported this a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
- RandyOrion 5mo agoWow. 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.
- srikanthsastry 5mo agoDetermining 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
- pglevy 5mo agoWondering what else I'm using from MS that might be at risk. <glances at TypeScript>
- henry2023 5mo ago[dead]
- dang 5mo agoRecent and related: Tell HN: VS Code v1.117.0 automatically adds GitHub Copilot as your co author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353 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)
- starefossen 5mo agoChanges the defaults. Does not care to provide a pull request description. Talk about hubris.
- simianparrot 5mo ago... 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.
- zombot 5mo agoIt's vibe coding all the way down.
- dsign 5mo agoThis 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.
- gyoridavid 5mo agowithing ONE week, Microsoft one-sidedly decided to 1. increase the LLM usage by 20x in Copilot 2. add rate hourly (roughly 4 hours blocks) and weekly rate limits to models use in Copilot 3. introduce credit based billing where you can't roll over unused credits 4. and now inserts themself to the commits as co-author Man, I really feel like they want us to hate them
- cdata 5mo ago> Man, I really feel like they want us to hate them Man, I feel old.
- gnegggh 5mo ago"microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 hours ago" :)
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- adamddev1 5mo agoI'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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bytesandbits 5mo agoI 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.
- sandeepkd 5mo agoInterestingly 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.
- mohamedabdallah 5mo ago[flagged]
- cvsnraju 5mo agothey fixed default behaviour https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931
- cvsnraju 5mo agonow it is not default https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931
- butterNaN 5mo agoReputational damage already done I think
- yoda7marinated 5mo agoHow long do you think it will take before the Free & Pro plans start showing ads in vscode and its terminal?
- Havoc 5mo agoMS sure is making a lot of strange moves as of late
- WhereIsTheTruth 5mo agoKPI maxxing gone wrong What's the legality of this, does this mean you give Copilot exclusive rights to your projects? Fishy fishy
- samagragune 5mo ago[dead]
- samagragune 5mo ago[dead]
- bravetraveler 5mo agoLeft with no choice but to add "co-authored with man + ansible-doc" to everything now
- villgax 5mo agodmitrivMS should be fired by microsoft if they wanna take ownership of this legal fiasco
- baobabKoodaa 5mo agoCome on. At least one person at Microsoft is trying to own up to a mistake and fix it.
- hansmayer 5mo agoFor 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/ 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.
- altun 5mo ago[dead]
- ludicrousdispla 5mo agoI wonder what sort of liability this introduces for Microsoft when their 'Co-Aauthored by Copilot' code causes harm.
- albert_e 5mo agoGiven 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.
- albert_e 5mo agoQuestion -- 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?
- trashface 5mo agoFor me it just inserted "Copilot" and I was only using inline completion, not agents. A bit weird too since my VSCode doesn't even have copilot installed as an extension (I had just started using that editor again on an old linux install and was wondering why I was even getting AI completions).
- kevin_thibedeau 5mo agoSo you add a precommit script that strips it out.
- steve1977 5mo agoNever attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
- dbacar 5mo agoYou can turn it off.
- croemer 5mo agoThe "regardless of usage" in the HN title isn't correct. If you dig into the source you see that the attribution line is only added when some changes in the commit come from Copilot, either inline completion or agent. @dang
- tuetuopay 5mo agoThat is the crux of the issue: the detection of whether the changes came from copilot or not is buggy, thus all changes are flagged as coming from copilot, thus the title is correct.
- croemer 5mo agoThat's not what the Pull Request intends, though. There's a difference between "This PR is buggy and enables attribution on everything" vs "VS Code enables attribution on everything". The title is fuzzy on intent, making people believe it's intentional when one shouldn't assume intention (Hanlon).
- fastasucan 5mo agoWho cares what it intends when they approve it and put into production?
- croemer 5mo ago[dead]
- trashface 5mo agoWas this rolled out to individuals (especially non paying accounts) early? I was hit by this over a week ago on my side project, but it seems to be just blowing up now.
- ectospheno 5mo agoI can only imagine this passing their “QA” because every dev there uses AI for every commit and therefore saw no issue.
- marsxr360 5mo agoIncredible. I would like to study the of people who thought it is a good idea. Reading comments on GitHub made me laugh. Made me also wonder, what's the next step?
- mert-kurttutan 5mo agoIt would be to starting giving a chance to other competitors. I have been very comfortable zed except for 2 issues (on Linux). After they are resolved, I will probably start using it 100% of the time.
- axegon_ 5mo agoEvery time I read one of these, I wish I could add a permanent background music to everything I say: The Hives - Hate to Say I Told You So.
- liendolucas 5mo agoWhat a shitshow. People should stop using as many Microsoft products as possible and move on. Seriously, it's the best silent feedback that can ever be delivered in cases like these.
- politelemon 5mo agoThe toxic behaviour by hn commenters in that thread is absolutely shameful. Whether you feel strongly about it or not, there is a civil way to discuss things and that isn't it.
- starkeeper 5mo agoThey do not care about customers because they are the customer and users are hostages. They only care about hostage count and other shitty metrics.
- pvtmert 5mo agoThe best part is: Copilot did not catch the impact/implications of this change in the (automatic) review. Should we continue to keep trusting the AI review provided by Copilot?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- predkambrij 5mo agoI really, really, really like Github Copilot agent harness. I was using it as my primary coding agent for the past year. I really hope it will remain affordable. I knew that $10/month won't last forever for the amount of usage I was getting out of it. It's far better than claude code and codex that I'm testing now (because I burned weekly limit in less than a day).
- Amber-chen 5mo ago[flagged]
- realjohnsewell 5mo ago[dead]
- gbrennon 5mo ago[flagged]
- ishizakahiroshi 5mo agoAuto-adding AI as a co-author feels wrong unless users explicitly opt in. Defaults matter a lot in developer tools.
- srikanthsastry 5mo agoTo me, the more interesting question is the following. Why does the architecture make it possible for a system to collect user consent and divorce the enforcement of it from the consent collection itself? The proposed process fixes are good and all, but really, the fix IMHO should be structural. Your CI should fail if you don't propagate consent decisions down the stack. Also worth noting: `Co-Authored-By` implies joint authorship. The Linux kernel uses `Assisted-by:` for AI specifically because the legal weight is different. And git history is permanent. You can revert a default. You can't revert commit history across thousands of repos.