alt Hacker NewsVS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
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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.....
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.
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).
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.
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.
FYI, they changed the default of 'git.addAICoAuthor' to 'chatAndAgent' afterwards: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880
So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'
"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.
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?
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?
So you add a precommit script that strips it out.
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?
Microsoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.
Next it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza
microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.
Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.
I wonder what sort of liability this introduces for Microsoft when their 'Co-Aauthored by Copilot' code causes harm.
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.
Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.
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.
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.
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.
Wow that pr itself looks amateurish. I reported this a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
If your code is "co-authored by Copilot", does that then allow future AI to train on it without your consent?
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
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.
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)
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?
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.
Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.
Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.
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.
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 <[email protected]>
Save and exit
Force push the change: git push --force-with-lease
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.
Looks like it comes into play for telemetry and here in actual commits:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...
withing 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
Left with no choice but to add "co-authored with man + ansible-doc" to everything now
How long do you think it will take before the Free & Pro plans start showing ads in vscode and its terminal?
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
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.