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

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

#52

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 care…

When I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned.

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.

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

#53
post #27
post #4

"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.

That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver. 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 216-726-0737

Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.

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

#55

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.

The LLM is just a database. Would you be fine if this was done when cribbing stuff from Github, StackOverflow, tutorials and so on, or do you think some databases are more special than others in this regard, and if so, on what merit?

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

#57
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).

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

#58

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.

I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?

It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.

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

#59
post #11

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?

vim and emacs are both still great choices.

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

#60

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 care…

> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

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.

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