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

Post by _doctor_love » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:38 PM UTC

serial_dev wrote: post #498

somebehemoth wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Was there really no internal discussion from a code review at least? This seems hard for me to believe. The outlined story feels unfortunately very believable to me. Teams need to push out the most number of features, and nobody stops even for a second to think about how a feature might affect other flows or other users not in the feature request. It might have been quickly reviewed to check if the code does what i…

Post by benchwright » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

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…

Post by PinkSheep » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

jdenning wrote: post #726

dmitriv wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First comment does not sound constructive - are you interested in my opinion on (n)vim? I am not a legal, so can't comment on legal things. However, I have already responded elsewhere here that this feature has nothing to do with licensing or ownership and was added for those that want the attribution. I understand the desire to see anything Microsoft as bad and evil, but we are really just trying to make a better ex…

Perhaps next time you should consult with legal before asserting co-authorship on end users’ code. The appended comment was not “edited with VS code” or “sent from VS code”, it was “co-authored by Copilot”. You do understand that there are legal implications to claims of authorship, right?

Post by throw_await » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:25 PM UTC

dmitriv wrote: post #639

rmunn wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not him, but it was pretty obvious that the comments section was going to be attracting more and more people saying the same thing that had already been said before, and that no useful discussion was going to be had. At some point the value of spamming everyone who commented on the issue with a notification (which puts an email in your inbox if you haven't changed the default setting) becomes lower and lower. I'v…

Thank you so much for explaining the exact reason I did it! I am reading all pings from GitHub on VS Code and this was just turning into a stream of spam that wasn't adding much new information.

Post by liendolucas » Sun, May 03, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

dmitriv wrote: post #542

jamesbfb wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s a few of us who appreciate you being up front. I’d question the intent and why it was a mistake, especially when the commit[0] message reverting said functionality states “widespread criticism” citing this very HN article makes it look seemingly like the revert is due to negative PR opposed to a mistake. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313725/commits/1e70...

I am reverting it because there are bug in the feature and it obviously does not work as expected. Any feedback is important, HN or not.