alt Hacker NewsVS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage
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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.
So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
My early paranoia about corporate AI is really maturing. No one’s really laughing at me anymore either.
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?
> 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.
So much for their commitment to quality: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/03/20/our-com...
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.
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.
Microsoft is enshittifying VS Code. I have already started looking for a lifeboat.
Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.
In typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
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.
Poor Courtney
Finally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up
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$.
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...
Claude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.
Well, that's good news for all the developers working at companies with delusional management proclaiming "100% of code will be written by AI in 6 months"!
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Growth hacking at its best /s
I really hope the editor wars don't start again. I've been happily using VsCode for years now. More than happy in fact, it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used, as evidenced by how AI companies basically started as a VsCode fork.
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?
If you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?
Seems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back