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

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sent from my iPhone is worse than intel inside or claude in the commits in my opinion. There is something so gross about injecting an advertising message into every single communication a user has on their device.

You misunderstand the purpose of "Sent from my iPhone" - it was a status symbol, it showed that the sender was part of the superior iPhone owning elite. It was trivial to remove, but most didnt "oh, I am too busy too remove it, I guess I'll just leave it and let everybody know I can afford an iPhone". You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.

That's advertising with extra steps. Apple having created an ingroup and an outgroup is very effective advertising on their side.

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

#42
post #35

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.

VSCode updates itself what feels like daily so everyone is on the bleeding edge. There are upsides and downsides to that but it doesn’t feel like a trade-off many have made purposefully.

You can disable auto-updates for VS Code, and you can install older versions of it.

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

#43
post #5

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.

Yeah break up all the big companies so Chinese state sponsored behemoths can take over everything. This isn’t the 90s where Americans only competed with other Americans.

China is competing so well because it has a central bureaucracy that issues 5 year plans and issues money to get them done. Do you think America should do that too, or do you think America and China are different countries with different values?

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

#44
post #3

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

That doesn’t quite work for cases where you’re either the primary author of a commit (asking the model for some touch ups) or when you heavily edit model output. Easier to just say “this is who’s driving the AI” and keep it to your username.

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

#45
post #4

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.

Sent from my iPhone is worse than intel inside or claude in the commits in my opinion. There is something so gross about injecting an advertising message into every single communication a user has on their device.

These are the same thing. Marketing, and the ability to track reach. There's no other reason to do this.

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

#46
post #28

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 avo…

Agree. I'm more reliant on having a keyboard than on having copilot make tab suggestions and I wouldn't like my PRs to include a tag: "Keystrokes courtesy of: Keychron K3 Max".

Definitely. Can you imagine the kind of world we'd live in if we had to sign each message with each product we used?

This message brought to you by Xfinity Internet.

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

#48
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.

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

#49
post #3

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

That doesn’t quite work for cases where you’re either the primary author of a commit (asking the model for some touch ups) or when you heavily edit model output. Easier to just say “this is who’s driving the AI” and keep it to your username.

> doesn’t quite work for cases

In that case, the "Co-authored-by: Copilot" method doesn't quite work either. You have to split the commit somehow.

> this is who’s driving the AI

As indicated by the consistent user.email value.

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

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sent from my iPhone is worse than intel inside or claude in the commits in my opinion. There is something so gross about injecting an advertising message into every single communication a user has on their device.

You misunderstand the purpose of "Sent from my iPhone" - it was a status symbol, it showed that the sender was part of the superior iPhone owning elite. It was trivial to remove, but most didnt "oh, I am too busy too remove it, I guess I'll just leave it and let everybody know I can afford an iPhone". You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.

I always thought this was an implicit request to forgive obvious typos and autocorrect mistakes. Sent from a mobile device (iPhone, Samsung Galaxy, Blackberry, Windows Phone, etc.) with a tiny keyboard and in a setting in which proofreading may not be as rigorous as normal.
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