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Stop Advertising in Your Commits

akselmo.dev

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Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#81

Post by andrewl-hn »

AI code is uncopyrightable. If you want to be hygienic about it you would let AI commit code as is, and if you don't like the code and decide to change it manually this should be a separate human-only commit. Mixed human-AI commits add ambiguity about copyrightability of that code. So its should be either:

    Author: Some AI model, Committer: You Friendly Dev
or

    Author and Committer: Your Friendly Dev
"Co-authored by AI model" is a nonsense that AI labs are pushing everywhere because they definitely want the copyright rules to change, so that while their armies of employees feed LLM prompts every day for the past 4 years they can still claim that the IP is theirs an theirs only. "See all Co-Authored commits, your honor? There's no way to split them apart, so they should all be ours!"

The laws will likely change in the US thanks to lobby, and maybe even change in Europe, too, where they may compromise about it to "not be left behind" and will present them under "Digital Sovereignty" umbrella.

Overall, this "Co-Authored" bit is yet another Trojan horse.

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#82

Post by cautiouscat »

munchler wrote: post #75

> Disclose your "AI" tools in a merge request if needed but leave them out of the damn commits, those are for technical information and not for advertising. I think this is very poor advice. Knowing who/what changed the code is often crucial for understanding why it changed.

I don’t agree/disagree, but why does knowing Claude vs. Codex did it become crucial? What can you do with that information?

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#83

Post by layer8 »

mbreese wrote: post #16
deepsun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the post doesn't say about hiding that, you can write "created by AI" or "helped by LLM". The post is about advertising for commercial products.

Their rant was about any and all AI notices in commits. They specifically state that merge requests is where that belongs. I personally disagree and think commit messages makes the most sense. But I also think it's up to the personal preference of whoever owns the repository.

Not true. They state “just add "generated by an LLM" but do not give those companies free advertising space”, and the reference to merge requests is specifically in regard to disclosing which AI tool was used.

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#84

Post by FarmerPotato »

zetanor wrote: post #55

commit 85cd835e5923cddc1882e74354eac8dba6a925c1 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Author: John AuthorDate: Fri May 22 13:25:33 2026 -0000 Merged PR #197 Tired of planning for dinner every day? FoodDrop™ is the premier ready-to-cook meal-by-drone delivery service in the greater Vancouver area and Belize. Get one month of food dropped onto your driveway by FoodDrop™ for only $12.95 when you use this commit's…

Merged PR #1337 Squashing commit history to get rid of vi call-outs.

This commit was created in emacs, the best text editor ever!

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#85

Post by beshrkayali »

In the case of Claude or others, it is not just an advertisement, it's the weird shape the industry is spinning LLM-assisted-coding as a "co-author" relationship where it should be thought of more like a user-using-a-tool relationship. When you make a design with Photoshop or InDesign, it's not "co-designed by Photoshop", it's just a tool and you used the filters it provides.

It is slightly weird that people accepted this new trend just like that, probably because they think this is being transparent and wanting to give attribution, but it'd be more useful like what the Linux kernel "AI Coding Assistants" page describes, something like `AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2]`, at least we get to know which model was used and/if any additional tooling on top. And `Assisted-by:` is more appropriate for that purpose than `Co-authored-by`.

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#87

Post by johnfink8 »

epistasis wrote: post #44

I have to ask Claude to stop doing this about every two days, and usually I don't see it until after a push to a remote repo. So annoying. Just stop, Anthropic, please. And pay attention to the request to stop, instead of silently turning it back on again all the time. Latest thing was linking to the Claude session that generated some of the PR. Put in somewhere that a commit had LLM assistance, fine, but don't spam…

Skill issue. These are all skill issues. Claude CLI is extremely customizable. You can even just ask claude to make that change global to your system.

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#88

Post by mschuster91 »

jonnyasmar wrote: post #17
ishan0102 wrote: post #9

I much prefer this over the alternative where people use AI to code without anyone knowing.

Who really cares, though? AI is just a tool. If the code is good, the code is good.

> AI is just a tool. If the code is good, the code is good.

The problem is, someone has to review it (lest you end up like Amazon, offing parts of AWS and once the main storefront due to vibeslop ending up in production).

And I personally hate reviewing AI code with a passion. With a junior, easy, I can guide and teach them - and hopefully next time, they'll have improved. That's what I'm there for. But with AI? No matter if it's me using an AI or reviewing an MR created with AI assistance by a colleague - I can be pretty sure that next round I'll get exactly the same issues again because, by definition, AI agents are inference, not training, and thus incapable of improving unless the overlords want it to.

On top of that, if not very carefully guided, AI tends to create the ultimate sloppypasta - thousands of lines of code in a single file, completely impossible even for an ADHD brain to understand what is going on. But when you go and write an AGENTS.md or carefully engineer prompts... at that level of effort, you could just do it yourself.

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#89

Post by dgacmu »

I gently disagree. I think that having provenance information logged is valuable - both to the project ("please ban dga because he's submitting ai slop") and to people who might want to study all of this stuff ("interesting, ai coauthored PRs were rejected at a rate X times that of non-attributed PRs"). I think a non-advertising header of some sort that included more specific information about the LLM would be even better, of course.

Re: Stop Advertising in Your Commits

#90

Post by cortesoft »

deepsun wrote: post #12
ishan0102 wrote: post #9

I much prefer this over the alternative where people use AI to code without anyone knowing.

No, the post doesn't say about hiding that, you can write "created by AI" or "helped by LLM". The post is about advertising for commercial products.

They do add a “or just don’t use them at all” which shows the author’s true opinion
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