Update on "Co-authored-by: Copilot" in commit messages

2 days ago:

> We did catch it internally in testing [1]

Today:

> bug in the code that was not found in testing.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193

All the people there asking the simple question of why it got changed and getting ignored.

I am using a different approach.

`user.email` is always my email.

`user.name` is either my account name, or model name like `gpt-5.5-high`.

I can easily filter & blame which line was written by me or some specific AI

I'm not sure that anyone wants the scarlet letter of an AI coauthor on their code just because they used something simple like next edit suggestions or AI autocomplete. It seems like the "all" setting basically only exists for people that haven't figured out how to change it to something else yet.

(Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)

I work at MSFT. I can understand the incentives behind this change. Although I am not sure how different GitHub culture is from MSFT.

I am sure they are closely tracking this metric of Copilot authored PRs so that everyone down from Nadella to the dev and PM for this can use it to hype up GH Copilot. It’s also a simple and clean metric that goes well in your Connects (performance discussion), you could say the feature I worked on led to xx million copilot authored PRs and there is now an AI usage mandate and you need to mention how you used AI to do something more efficiently blah blah. It’s good old promotion theatre. I don’t think its unique to MSFT though and is probably common across Big Tech.

> There was a bug in the code that was not found in testing that attributed non-Copilot code completions to Copilot.

The bug is not about code behavior, but rather about getting noticed by users :)

Are they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.

It's only one sliver of the problem here, but -- do you know how often I update my code editor? Like once every five or ten years, to the version that was released a year or two ago.

I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.

I don't get why people are upset here. Vibed code is easy to spot even if you don't credit the LLM in Git.

    # increment the current number of users — do it by one
    n_users += 1

Default to ON is a complete dik move

Honestly extremely pathetic by a trillion dollar corporation that has a massive, undemocratic, say in how technology is developed in this country.

Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.

Inserting authorship claims is incredibly tacky. It’s today’s “Intel Inside” sticker. I don’t want your stickers on the computer I bought.

“Sent from my iPhone” isn’t an authorship claim.

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