VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage

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.

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.....

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.

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.

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?

If your code is "co-authored by Copilot", does that then allow future AI to train on it without your consent?

This 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.

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?

    microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes ago

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Adding anything to my commits or PRs or anything else is a deal breaker TBH

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.

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

We got a positive response just before "microsoft locked as spam": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226#event-251003...

Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.

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?

Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.

Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.

This is why I never ever commit through the gui.

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.

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.

Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.

Looks like it comes into play for telemetry and here in actual commits:

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...

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

This is really bad.

Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.

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."

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"

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

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.

Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?

Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?

PMs at Microsoft have incredibly bad taste

Seems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back

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.

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.

Co-authored-by iPhone

So much for their commitment to quality: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...

So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow

Default or mandatory gift authorship?

In typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.