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Update on "Co-authored-by: Copilot" in commit messages
- jdw64 5mo ago[dead]
- est 5mo agoI am using a different approach. `user.email` is always my email. `user.name` is either my account name, or model name like `gpt-5.5-high`. I can easily filter & blame which line was written by me or some specific AI
- sillysaurusx 5mo agoThat doesn’t quite work for cases where you’re either the primary author of a commit (asking the model for some touch ups) or when you heavily edit model output. Easier to just say “this is who’s driving the AI” and keep it to your username.
- est 5mo ago> doesn’t quite work for cases In that case, the "Co-authored-by: Copilot" method doesn't quite work either. You have to split the commit somehow. > this is who’s driving the AI As indicated by the consistent user.email value.
- sillysaurusx 5mo agoHm, why? Just attribute it to yourself and be done with it. Is there a use case for classifying commits as AI assisted? Besides corporate bureaucracy.
- jamietanna 5mo agoNice! I've been doing similar, but prefer using Co-authored-by, especially as it allows for cases where there may be multiple models in play
- junofan 5mo agoInserting authorship claims is incredibly tacky. It’s today’s “Intel Inside” sticker. I don’t want your stickers on the computer I bought. “Sent from my iPhone” isn’t an authorship claim.
- kelseydh 5mo agoOn the flip side there are people who believe that LLM-assisted coding changes require attribution in git history.
- silverwind 5mo agoIt's definitely helpful to know whether a PR was AI-assisted or not and the git attribution line is a simple and effective way of communicating that. I also recommend specifying model name and version so the maintainer knows upfront the level of slop they are dealing with.
- jamietanna 5mo agoAs I've written elsewhere in the thread, having worked at a large Enterprise in collaboration with Legal, if there isn't tracking of what AI contributions you have, it's harder to be protected legally by ie Microsoft's indemnity clause if you're sued
- dyauspitr 5mo agoWhat’s the problem with intel inside? That’s perfectly normal.
- reaperducer 5mo agoWhat’s the problem with intel inside? That’s perfectly normal. I don't want my computer to look like it's racing in NASCAR.
- pitched 5mo agoI would take a sticker for a sponsorship. That could be a good deal. Not for free though!
- shimman 5mo agoHonestly extremely pathetic by a trillion dollar corporation that has a massive, undemocratic, say in how technology is developed in this country. Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.
- dyauspitr 5mo agoYeah break up all the big companies so Chinese state sponsored behemoths can take over everything. This isn’t the 90s where Americans only competed with other Americans.
- Waterluvian 5mo agoHonestly not sure I find that prospect worse than the American status quo. At least the Chinese regime is a rational actor.
- jimmaswell 5mo ago"America is just as bad as China" is not cute or clever; it's trite and objectively wrong. There really is no intellectually honest argument to the contrary. For starters we don't get arrested for saying "Kent State Massacre" - can't say as much for "Tiananmen Square" in China. No matter how atrocious our government may be at times, it doesn't hold a candle to them.
- alehlopeh 5mo agoGP didn’t say all the big tech companies. Just Microslop.
- starfallg 5mo agoNope, just break up the one that has been consistently found to be abusing their market position. Microsoft has been embroiled in this since the 90s.
- 5mo ago
- Waterluvian 5mo agoAll the people there asking the simple question of why it got changed and getting ignored.
- xigoi 5mo agoWe all know the answer anyway.
- chao- 5mo agoThere ought to be decent number of people within Microsoft who have "Copilot usage" as a KPI. I don't think this was gamesmanship on their part (no sarcasm, I truly do not suspect malice), but I'm sure if it could have slipped in without backlash, they would have enjoyed seeing their line go up.
- ahartmetz 5mo agoSorry, I don't see another plausible motive than KPIs must go up. The change came from a product manager and was also reviewed and approved by one or two apparently senior developers. They may have tried to slip it in accidentally on purpose.
- classified 5mo agoNot suspecting malice from Microslop is an untenable and unsafe position.
- netule 5mo agoSo freaking weird. Is it normal at MS for Product Managers to push code? wtf Original PR: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226
- javascriptfan69 5mo agoIsn't this the promise of AI?
- jamietanna 5mo ago
- gowld 5mo ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 5mo agoDefault to ON is a complete dik move
- utopiah 5mo agoIt's not even default to ON, it's default to ALL (or at least to a lot), even non co-pilot commits, that's what made people made. If it was at least correct maybe it would have gone unnoticed.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jwilliams 5mo agoAre they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.
- zaptrem 5mo agoSeems pretty clear, Claude and Codex were getting a lot of free publicity by instructing their models to do the same and MS wanted similar results. However, a bug caused this to be applied to all commits instead of all Copilot-influenced commits.
- utopiah 5mo agoThey did say it's a bug that they even caught during testing yet somehow let go through. Author of the issue mentioned this on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193
- jwilliams 5mo ago"AI attribution by default" was an intentional feature, but there were also bugs. This is why the post is so unclear.
- worldsavior 5mo agoProbably because it's a PM who coded that bug, so no contest.
- utopiah 5mo agoWho vibe coded it because who needs coders nowadays anyway.
- cube00 5mo ago2 days ago: > We did catch it internally in testing [1] Today: > bug in the code that was not found in testing. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193
- maxloh 5mo agoThe bug is not about code behavior, but rather about getting noticed by users :)
- backwardsponcho 5mo ago"We're sorry we got caught"
- arcfour 5mo agoI'm not sure that anyone wants the scarlet letter of an AI coauthor on their code just because they used something simple like next edit suggestions or AI autocomplete. It seems like the "all" setting basically only exists for people that haven't figured out how to change it to something else yet. (Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)
- henry2023 5mo agoAgree. I'm more reliant on having a keyboard than on having copilot make tab suggestions and I wouldn't like my PRs to include a tag: "Keystrokes courtesy of: Keychron K3 Max".
- jasonkester 5mo agoYeah. I wasn’t angry about this a couple days ago, but I am now. So the thing that’s on by default and makes autocomplete worse (plain intelligence never changed my s.x = 0 to s.xVInputRadiusDetectionThreshold = 0 if I happened to take my eyes off the screen for a moment) is now stealing credit for my work? I’m speechless. Also glad I use a standalone git client.
- montroser 5mo agoIt's only one sliver of the problem here, but -- do you know how often I update my code editor? Like once every five or ten years, to the version that was released a year or two ago. I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.
- pitched 5mo agoVSCode updates itself what feels like daily so everyone is on the bleeding edge. There are upsides and downsides to that but it doesn’t feel like a trade-off many have made purposefully.
- ncallaway 5mo agoYou can disable auto-updates for VS Code, and you can install older versions of it.
- gertop 5mo agoVS Code is updated monthly. More and more they also release a bugfix to the monthly release, a week or two after.
- Cu3PO42 5mo agoThey switched to a weekly release cycle, presumably to compete with the perceived iteration speed of the many VS Code forks.
- maxloh 5mo ago> There was a bug in the code that was not found in testing that attributed non-Copilot code completions to Copilot. The bug is not about code behavior, but rather about getting noticed by users :)
- xdennis 5mo agoI don't get why people are upset here. Vibed code is easy to spot even if you don't credit the LLM in Git. # increment the current number of users — do it by one n_users += 1
- AbbeFaria 5mo agoI work at MSFT. I can understand the incentives behind this change. Although I am not sure how different GitHub culture is from MSFT. I am sure they are closely tracking this metric of Copilot authored PRs so that everyone down from Nadella to the dev and PM for this can use it to hype up GH Copilot. It’s also a simple and clean metric that goes well in your Connects (performance discussion), you could say the feature I worked on led to xx million copilot authored PRs and there is now an AI usage mandate and you need to mention how you used AI to do something more efficiently blah blah. It’s good old promotion theatre. I don’t think its unique to MSFT though and is probably common across Big Tech.
- prosunpraiser 5mo agoThere are alternative ways to gather telemetry data about your usage, then literally polluting the commit message / PR description of the author. Why even consider doing that in the first place?
- Henchman21 5mo ago> I am sure they are closely tracking this metric of Copilot authored PRs Yeah that number goes WAY UP when you assume all commits are co-authored by Copilot! This "bug" is an attempt to muddy the waters of what is and is not copyrightable and/or usable for training data. Full stop. You may be an honest person, but your employers are not.
- petra56Giovanna 5mo ago[dead]