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.
[0]https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313725/commits/1e70...
To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.
This kind of thing being released speaks to a greater disfunction over there. Not a good look at all and I am not a Microsoft or AI hater. But my commit messages are not where you move fast and break things
- a project manager vibe-coded the change without thinking it through at all
- the PR was reviewed by an LLM
- an actual engineer gave LGTM without really reviewing the changes, trusting the LLM
Did I get this right?
> As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.
It's really doubtful they have the same behavior people are complaining about here: namely including the authored by Copilot statement when it wasn't used (or even enabled).
Here's one:
I think a senior sysadmin needs to sit you down in their office and have a very serious talk with you about the responsibility that comes with writing code other people run. I am serious. We used to have these talks with everyone who got sudo access. You shouldn't be shipping code if you don't understand the trust that is required of people in your position.
This isn't just about this "feature" being active when AI features are disabled, the way you mis-implemented this has resulted in it modifying the commit message with the user even seeing it! That is malicious behavior, not an innocent little feature "to make life easier".
I've fully switched off of VS Code to Kate now, which is faster and better behaved in most cases anyway. Bye.
Literally who?
Only callous disregard for your users
> many similar tools do this as well
But since we have normalised that, it’s okay?
I simply do not believe you
I think the default to on should also be reconsidered regardless. The assessment (co-authored by AI) may be valid but the assumption the user wants that advertising is exactly that, an assumption, and a dubious one at that.
Does anyone (or any team) have ownership of the extensions/git/package.json file?
Then make it an extension, not a IDE-behaviour thing. Is that so complicated, so difficult?
What metric did Microsoft use to assess that VS Code users "expect" their commits to have unsolicited messages added to them?
> Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI.
Did you discuss adding these messages with your legal department?
What is Microsoft's position on adding such authorship statements to the code Microsoft did not author?
Or is Microsoft stating that using LLM assistants makes Microsoft a co-author of the code?
Does Microsoft have copyright claims on the code if LLM assistants are used at any time during its creation?
Can you expand on this? Who "expects" their code editor to lie about using Copilot?
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.
As a result I’ll be uninstalling vscode from all my machines, I’m tired of disabling things in vscode I didn’t ask for especially in regards to AI.
There are open source tools that clearly respect users more and have a track record of not doing these kinds of stupid things.
Be better.
- It wasn't our intention
- Our users asked for it [you'll have to take our word for it]
- Everyone else is doing it anyway
- Statement that I am reasonable and will be co-operative with the community but with conditions
That's a bingo!
Please elaborate on what "similar tools" claim that commits are co-authored by AI when the AI features are all turned off. You're trying to defend the theoretically correct version of this that you didn't make, not the actual version you did make.
> I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions
It's hard to take this seriously; you know exactly what you did wrong here and what you should have done instead. Testing that this doesn't happen when Copilot was not used is extremely trivial; if you're not lying about it being unintentional, the fact that it didn't occur to anyone to do it still says more than enough about what the priorities are here. At absolute best, the priorities of you and your team are so fundamentally wrong that it's impossible to trust any of you going forward.
But I'm an idiot every day too, so I can relate. We can only learn from these mistakes, keep it up!
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.
2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it
2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
I read that as a sign to make a coordinated exit.
Truth be told our project was one of many "catalogue of stuff" kind of apps which at this and projected scale could have well been a spreadsheet in the cloud with search enhanced by LLM.
This AI boom is not a boom because its good for developers or users. It's a boom because it's a management dream; the promise of pumping up growth while reducing expensive workforce is simply too good for them to not throw decades of platitudes and "best practices" out the window. When people point out where AI fails, they're not seeing past the end of their nose. They don't realize they're not the real customers. It is leadership with millions in buying power who are the customers, and they're the same ones who only ever cared about managing the perception of success and growth; your clean code and user-focused development practices didn't matter to them back then and they certainly don't matter to them at all now. When it comes to an absolute state of garbage products and software, we still ain't seen nothin' yet.
Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.
I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?
I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.
If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.
To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?
More likely, never learned about it in the first place, save a few whispers. Who's got time to go digging in deep, when there's 'experiments to run, research to be done' ...
> I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
new blood, new greed
It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.
Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.
Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
Mmm... I think I missed that part.
So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.
They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.
I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.
I don't think it's fear; it's greed.
When did this happen?
I’m sure Google cares very much about UX as a funnel into their ad brokerage, but was there some time when they cared about it in the user’s interest?
Maybe that magical moment when the results page showed the results first?
You could say it's the terminal[2] user interface.
> turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface
Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.
VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.
It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.
It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.
Same hypers just moved to different technology.
I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh
"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.
Which literal 20+ year period was that?
If you look at the staggering amounts of money that have been put into the tech, this attitude becomes practically mandatory, in an inhuman sense. They have to get ROI, at literally any cost. And it shows.
TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it
Have we been using the same Google?
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?
> 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).
"Sent from my iPhone" appears in the authoring view, and you can delete it.
Co-authored-by: NEVER appears in the commit message UI - it is added without the user even seeing it.
I’ve always seen that practice of using the user as your recommendation lever without their consent as unethical.
If AI generates code, and one just renames some variables/method signatures, then what?
So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'
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
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 216-726-0737It's interesting to see how communication, digital and otherwise, has evolved over time.
The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?
This is the author of the MR - 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.
> LinkedIn users attempting identity verification may be unknowingly handing sensitive personal data to Persona Identities Inc., a company that distributes information to government agencies, credit bureaus, utilities, and mobile providers.
^ Link from a LinkedIn page I found on a Kagi search.
I can view some LinkedIn pages but not others without logging in.
Even though I’ve never posted to LinkedIn it only use it as a public résumé, my account was flagged as needing identity verification. I’m pretty sure this happened a year or two ago when I changed my email address from one domain I owned to another domain I owned.
I’ve never been able to log in since then, and there is no support path. The only available way past it is to simply submit all the info to Persona.
Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.
You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s
And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?
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.
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.
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.
Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer
Anyone else remember the bill gates borg category on slashdot?
When Hotmail inserted “sent using Hotmail” in emails as a growth hack it didn’t have legal consequences. This might.
microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes agoand 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...
In addition, using the word microslop instead of microsoft is again justified, 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.
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
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.
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.
Defaults matter a lot in developer tools.
Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"
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.
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
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)
Should we continue to keep trusting the AI review provided by Copilot?
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
Man, I feel old.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...
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?
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."
"Here's we increased number of commits by Copilot from X to Y, %Z increase"
And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.
How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?
Make it make sense.
You can get away with lying.
You can lie to judges.
You can get away with lying to judges.
You can profit from getting away with lying to judges.
A judge isn't involved, anyway. The leaker would have to take you to court and then prove that your request was in bad faith and that they didn't infringe copyright.
Competent programmers understand how to tell the computer what needs to happen. Really good programmers understand how the computer executed the code, and take advantage of it - they know about speculative execution and cache prefetching. Competent lawyers know what the law says. Really good lawyers understand how the law is executed, and take advantage of it - they know when it won't be enforced.
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.
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
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.
To be direct about this: this is actually our fault they fell for this. It’s your fault too. We’re the ones building the future for the next generation/s, so whatever “tricks” they fall for are created by our generation (to extract or generate wealth, amongst other things.)
That’s on us to do better through education and fighting back.
We don’t need snarky comments like this, especially when the technology in question is so pervasive and takes a lot of cognitive effort to avoid. The blame lies solely with Microsoft.
If one hasn't been personally betrayed yet, it is easy to minimize or ignore the warnings of others who have been through the predatory/anticompetitive, EEE, stack ranking, etc. eras of MS.
- Refusing for over seven years to offer a simple UI to clear "issues" pane, instead blaming plugin authors for not 'owning' the content. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/66982
Microsoft hasn't cared about the actual users of VSCode for a very long time.
And honestly I think this case is just a perpetually clueless manager getting over-joyous with vibecoding (to the point of being marveled at changing two lines of code without blowing everything up).
It's probably going to be reverted in the coming days. Which doesn't change the fact that it's a very Microsoft way of operating.
Not only is it free of MS "telemetry" nonsense, it is also way quieter to use, no bullshit popups for updates etc.
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.
So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.
Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.
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.
Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.
But I don't want it to make commits, and I don't want to review its code in the Claude Code TUI, either. I want to read its changes in my text editor, decide what to drop or revise or revert, and then stage individual hunks or regions into logical commits.
If anyone asks I'll tell them I used an LLM, idc. I often mention it in commit messages or PRs. But I don't want LLM agents to write commits at all.
Let AI autonomously produce code of a quality that I care about and I might consider giving it credit. I don't know how other people write code but I come up with an idea and use a multitude of LLMs to brainstorm a reasonably comprehensive spec that any reasonably competent person can read and produce a working program from, including a locally working Q2 quant of Qwen 3.6. Even Kimi is as good as Claude at most coding tasks, and I don't see why any single agent deserves any credit for my design.
Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.
Makes it clear you used a bullshit machine, without implying it's an author.
...assuming you think using them at all is a good move - I won't deny they have some utility (though I'd argue much lower than many seem to think), but I do presently believe they're a disaster for humanity.
The ruination of the Internet with slop, the massive propagation of propaganda, and the insanely easy-to-wield tools for abuse are in no way worth the ability to accrue tech debt at 10x velocity (though to be clear, accruing tech debt can absolutely be a useful strategy, if one I personally dislike).
In case you need reminding of common sense, I’m supposed to be allowed to decide what my commit messages are because it’s my fucking computer.
I prefer that my software is not a morality police.
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.
But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.
Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.
Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.
DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?
It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.
What's the legality of this, does this mean you give Copilot exclusive rights to your projects?
Fishy fishy
Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.
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?
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.
"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.
What a despicable behaviour from M$.
The organization and process that enables it to get to this point is the problem. And that is MS, always has been.
I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.
If this is indicative of practices over at MS these days, it explains a lot.
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.
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?
If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".