alt Hacker NewsVS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
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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."
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
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.
How long do you think it will take before the Free & Pro plans start showing ads in vscode and its terminal?
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"
We got a positive response just before "microsoft locked as spam": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226#event-251003...
sounds interesting
they fixed default behaviour
Seems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back
MS sure is making a lot of strange moves as of late
Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?
Changes the defaults. Does not care to provide a pull request description. Talk about hubris.
This is why I never ever commit through the gui.
So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
Wondering what else I'm using from MS that might be at risk. <glances at TypeScript>
Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?
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.
It's your own fault for using anything made by microsoft at this point.
Adding anything to my commits or PRs or anything else is a deal breaker TBH
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.
> 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.
My early paranoia about corporate AI is really maturing. No one’s really laughing at me anymore either.
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.
KPI maxxing gone wrong
What's the legality of this, does this mean you give Copilot exclusive rights to your projects?
Fishy fishy
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
Default or mandatory gift authorship?
Co-authored-by iPhone
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.
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.
The day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.
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.
Microsoft is enshittifying VS Code. I have already started looking for a lifeboat.
Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.
Things are getting shittier by the day. Lovely
"microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 hours ago" :)
In typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.
So much for their commitment to quality: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
just use vscodium (opensource vscode without microsoft's spyware) stop giving an increasingly incompetent org more control over your data ppl.
Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
dmitrivMS should be fired by microsoft if they wanna take ownership of this legal fiasco
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$.
Finally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up
Speaking of which, why does anybody use VS Code?
I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.
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...
Left with no choice but to add "co-authored with man + ansible-doc" to everything now