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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

#531

Post by dmitriv »

p-e-w wrote: post #333
dmitriv wrote: post #268

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…

I appreciate you acknowledging that this was a mistake, but as you surely know from your own experience with other people’s mistakes, some mistakes are so egregious that they cast doubt on the intentions of the people involved even if they are corrected later. 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…

If what you described would make it to our PR queue, it would definitely not pass the gates.

The idea was to track AI-only changes and add the trailer when such changes were detected AND the setting was enabled. Obviously, we didn't want to attribute all changes to AI. There is a bug in change detection (which slipped through testing), which led to even non-AI changes being tracked. And thus we have this problem.

The PR linked here wasn't even implementing the feature, it was changing the default for the setting.

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

#532

Post by cdata »

gyoridavid wrote: post #520

withing ONE week, Microsoft one-sidedly decided to 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 really feel like they want us to hate them

Man, I feel old.

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

#533

Post by low_tech_love »

tln wrote: post #159
low_tech_love wrote: post #32

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?

The sneaky commit modification is triggered by very modest usage of AI such as auto-completion. 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.

I personally don’t understand the need to treat a tool as an “author” but that’s not important, my comment is mostly regarding the backlash of what happened. A feature was rushed in and does not work as intended, in a kind of disastrous way. Now we feel like our customers do when they have to deal with all the crap that our AI co-authors push forward without the right process.

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

#534

Post by bitwize »

danlugo92 wrote: post #319
bitwize wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackernews used to experience a collective paroxysm of joy every time a new Visual Studio Code dropped. There definitely was a pervasive belief that the Nadella era ushered in a cuddly new Microsoft.

I remember a time, way back, around 2010 maybe?, where Microsoft was referred to as "M$" in this place and generally perceived as an evil corporation o.O

This was later—into their We U+2764 Open Source era. M$ and stuff dates from like the mid-late 90s. In the late 2010s was when they started publicly acknowledging that open source exists, acquiring GitHub, and releasing things like .NET Core and Visual Studio Code, and a lot of people in the open source camp did a "pointing soyjaks" and forgot that the Halloween Documents existed and that EEEing open source was already in their playbook.

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

#535

Post by zombot »

bsuvc wrote: post #406
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love a good dog-pile, but there is little constructive happening in that thread beyond variations of, "WTF?".

Who decides what is constructive?

It kind of messes up the fake statistics if users post unwanted stuff.

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

#537

Post by Aerolfos »

alemanek wrote: post #409
dmitriv wrote: post #268

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…

Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable. Even if this feature worked correctly, it obviously doesn’t, this should at minimum be a prompt after upgrade to let the user confirm that this is what they want. But honestly should be opt in for those that want it. To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that ad…

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.

I noticed that as soon as you make a bug report/feature request on VSCode's repo, you instantly get someone's OpenClaw agent with an automated pull request that sometimes wants to change defaults in the main codebase

Looks like AI is really trigger-happy with that, with zero understanding or care that there's thousands of users affected and it's not just one individual's settings.json

Also, the hallucinated PR does not necessarily address the original issue whatsoever, just like this PR. It should have functionality to detect AI-authored code, but whoever made the PR skipped actually doing the hard work and just changed a default to always on, exactly the kind of misunderstanding you see with OpenClaw shotgun PRs

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

#538

Post by dmitriv »

unchar1 wrote: post #309
dmitriv wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm here in case you have something to say to me directly.

What was the reasoning for this change?

There are customers who would like to see attribution on changes where AI contributed (companies, users, etc). True, that's not everyone, but you can query our repo for the issues for which this feature was implemented.

The rationale I suppose is those customers what to be more careful with code that was contributed by AI.

HTH

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

#539

Post by dmitriv »

somebehemoth wrote: post #349
dmitriv wrote: post #268

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…

I think the constructive criticism is best directed at whatever process you are following. That process allowed a very visible user facing change in a widely used piece of software. How did this change make it to production without some process catching the impact of this change? Was there really no internal discussion from a code review at least? This seems hard for me to believe. I expect more from Microsoft.

Fair point. We did catch it internally in testing (as we use VS Code for all our work, so some folks did stumble on it), but I think we underestimated the impact and should do a better job at that.

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

#540

Post by herrherrmann »

isityettime wrote: post #474
teg4n_ wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM actually points out the problem tho

Maybe the engineer's LLM agent's summary of the GitHub LLM bot's review omitted that warning.

Maybe the GitHub comments didn’t properly load due to the weekly partial outage.
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