alt Hacker NewsThe name "Undercover mode" and the line `The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI` sound spooky, but after reading the source my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human" given that the file is largely about hiding Anthropic internal information such as code names. I encourage looking at the source itself in order to draw your conclusions, it's very short: https://github.com/alex000kim/claude-code/blob/main/src/util...
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BAD (never write these):
- "Fix bug found while testing with Claude Capybara"
- "1-shotted by claude-opus-4-6"
- "Generated with Claude Code"
- "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <…>"
This makes sense to me about their intent by "UNDERCOVER"
> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"...
"Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."
I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI
Undercover mode seems like a way to make contributions to OSS when they detect issues, without accidentally leaking that it was claude-mythos-gigabrain-100000B that figured out the issue
Not leaking codenames is one thing, but explicitly removing signals that something is AI-generated feels like a pretty meaningful shift.