831 pointsby indrora6 hours ago80 comments
  • rsynnott5 hours ago
    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 cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.

    • storus4 hours ago
      It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.
      • mohamedkoubaa4 hours ago
        Principal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job)

        2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it

        2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please

        • palata4 hours ago
          To be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.
          • hirako20002 hours ago
            I saw a trend of UX/UI designers coming with practice which I knew better were wrong. But they insisted. E.g hijack brosser native controls.

            Will never know whether they passed along some manager/PM commandements or were just incompetent.

          • coldtea2 hours ago
            With some resistance. Now they do it far more often.
        • brazukadev4 hours ago
          That's how I got my first opportunity 20 years ago
      • xp842 hours ago
        It wasn’t AI that brought us Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards, nor the 10,000,000 ••• menus that have infested every webapp in the past 10 years as an alternative to thoughtful UI design. We humans made everything shitty before we made AI.
        • drivers9941 minutes ago
          > Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards

          It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.

        • befictious2 hours ago
          Good thing we trained our fortune teller calculators on all that historic shittiness!
        • coldtea2 hours ago
          Guns and bombs also didn't create war. But they did made it way more lethal.
        • iugtmkbdfil8342 hours ago
          Maybe, but at least the 10,000,000 options were there instead deemed that they are not to be used by those pesky users. And now its they are not just hidden. They are simply not there.
      • xnxan hour ago
        On the other hand, no one to place the blame on if management does it themselves.
      • digitaltrees2 hours ago
        Bring on the feature creep and epic down time
      • panny2 hours ago
        Aren't you guys glad there are no programmers gatekeeping programming with their "morals" and "etiquette"? Any marketer with an LLM can update the programming tool now. AI really levels the playing field and it's time for pesky programmers to get off their high horse, don't you think? :)
      • morpheos137an hour ago
        Perennial HN trope: all bad tech evolutions are management's fault. Engineers are flawless paragons of technical purity.
    • ExoticPearTree4 hours ago
      > Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

      Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.

      I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.

      • makeitdouble4 hours ago
        > greed

        Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?

        I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.

        If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.

        To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?

        • estimator72923 hours ago
          Approximately everybody would like more money.

          Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.

          Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.

          • pdpi2 hours ago
            I think there's one more factor that is crucially important — greedy people lack long-term vision, and care a lot more about money now than they do about potentially much more money in the future.

            I suppose it's kind of interesting that you could measure greed as an unusually high discount rate for the time value of money?

          • parineum32 minutes ago
            > Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business

            In my experience, it's much simpler.

            People are greedy if they make things I want cost more.

      • ProofHouse3 hours ago
        Whomever at Microsoft is making these decisions and oversees all this, yeeeesh
        • jcgrillo2 hours ago
          Isn't that just like.. what Microsoft has always been? Browser wars, Tay, bad behavior around open source software.. This is how they roll. They're being their best selves.
          • hirvi742 hours ago
            Thank you for this. I completely agree. Microsoft has always been awful, and the likely always will be. However, the did strike gold a handful of times, and they are just reliable enough to feed enterprises.
            • jcgrilloan hour ago
              Apple, Oracle, Adobe, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc... All the established players have their own distinct flavor of awful. This incident is just a very on-brand flavor for Microsoft.
      • cyanydeez4 hours ago
        AI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything.

        It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.

    • kami235 hours ago
      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.

    • pocksuppet4 hours ago
      Has always been the case. Corporations hate standards and would rather lock you in except where market forces prevent them. It was a miracle we have something like the internet - and the government had to create it.

      Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.

    • janice19995 hours ago
      They invested billions. They're scared.
      • ExoticPearTree4 hours ago
        > They invested billions. They're scared.

        They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.

        I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.

        • b00ty4breakfast3 hours ago
          "good" is not important for software anymore, at least in the regular consumer market. Companies have discovered that people will just continue to accept subpar, unfinished and sometimes even partially-functioning software.
          • justinclift3 hours ago
            "accept" is such a weird word for this, though I don't know of a better one in English.

            What we seem to be experiencing is a combination of monopoly power/abuse, and regulatory/government/court capture to keep it in place.

            • b00ty4breakfast2 hours ago
              if internet comments are any kind of indication (which they very well may not be) I've seen lots of people complaining about win11 but remaining because they can't give up playing their favorite online hero shooter. That's acceptance to me
              • an hour ago
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            • chillfox2 hours ago
              "tolerate" would be the better word to describe it
            • xp842 hours ago
              Agree that acceptance is irrelevant. No one has a choice, because all the “competitors” in any given niche (phone, cloud platform, PC operating system) are executing the same play. Enshittify, extract profit from ~suckers~ customers, ignore any churn because with the limited choices available there will be new suckers to replace them.

              We accept this the same way we accept the air quality wherever we are.

              Yes, Linux is there, but consider the barriers to the average person of truly adopting a strict Free Software life. Consider how many things in life now simply demand for you to have an Android or iOS phone. Things as simple as parking.

          • anonymarsan hour ago
            Well, now no one has to convince anyone to shell out for upgrades because everything is a subscription. What worked perfectly well can now get replaced out from under you overnight
        • rsynnott4 hours ago
          Making good products simply no longer seems to be on the agenda for most of these companies.
        • KronisLVan hour ago
          > They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.

          I really liked Copilot - it gave you a lot of tokens across a bunch of models and their agentic features were perfectly serviceable, alongside it being really affordable! And then they moved over to usage based billing and it no longer has that advantage over the alternatives: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...

          I still think they have a really good AI tab autocomplete implementation and it's nice to be able to use that in VSC without swapping to another editor altogether... but that's not enough to really make me pay for their subscription. I could probably move to Zed altogether if I had a problem with VSC itself, though at least the base editor doesn't feel like it has been enshittified and I quite like it, all things considered.

        • altmanaltman4 hours ago
          Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.
        • estimator72923 hours ago
          Good products are not profitable enough. Not that good products are profitable at all, but if it doesn't make disgusting amounts of money this quarter it's not worth considering at all.

          We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death

          • Gibbon13 hours ago
            The formulas used for asset valuations blow up when growth turns negative.
        • bigyabai4 hours ago
          > They could have shipped a good product with all those billions

          They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...

          • justinclift3 hours ago
            Not sure "good product" and "Azure" really belong in the same sentence.

            Have you read this?

            https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

          • rsynnott3 hours ago
            That's largely a product of work in the 2010s. What's their next Azure? Clippy on steroids probably won't cut it.
            • bigyabaian hour ago
              Their next Azure is the same as the next App Store and the next YouTube; they are services, you just keep operating them while they're in the green.

              Microsoft's B2C reputation is undeniably burnt, but their B2B mindshare is unshakable.

          • bigfatkitten2 hours ago
            I know a few people who worked on Azure’s FedRAMP ATOs, and “good” is not a word I’ve ever heard them use.
          • tacticus3 hours ago
            the cloud used because execs have already got a microsoft contract. (not to mention the fun licensing problem)
      • krupanan hour ago
        And they aren't the only ones! The bubble might be reaching it's size limits
      • cyanydeez4 hours ago
        They invested billions. They can exit in 6 months if this thing stays afloat.

        I don't think it's fear; it's greed.

    • diego_sandoval4 hours ago
      > Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

      Mmm... I think I missed that part.

      • smaudet4 hours ago
        Not everyone bought it, but they campaigned hard...and now see it was all just a dog and pony show. The hold-outs were right...
        • bigstrat2003an hour ago
          Not really. A company is not one monolithic entity with a single will. Far more plausible than "it was all a trick" is that for a time, people were in charge who really were trying to improve things, and now, those people have been replaced with others who are willing to burn it all down.
      • ninjalanternshk2 hours ago
        Before 2010 or so, “serious” internet developers wouldn’t touch Microsoft stuff — Microsoft was for office memos and poorly structured spreadsheets and that was it.

        So yeah, Azure being a real option at the highest levels of internet-scale operations is a turnaround from where they were.

        • Demiurge2 hours ago
          That’s not an accurate take. Microsoft has had a monopoly on the PC desktop OS. Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft. To call most of these developers “not serious” is quite and overstatement. This includes all PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe…?

          Azure expanded the Microsoft franchise, and provides another prong to their whole integration story just like cloud AD services and online Office 365 provide another way to stay integrated into their ecosystem.

          Yeah, they needed to work on their image somewhat, but their image never negatively impacted them

          • Supermanchoan hour ago
            > Anyone writing applications for users was targeting Windows and using Microsoft.

            Developers as users, sure. MSFT was common. Developers as responsible for infrastructure, MSFT anything was considered a huge risk and unreliable in the 90s.

            Granted, my memory retains only a general narrative...I remember a shift by 2002ish when I started to see windows servers as perfectly fine machines for closet/under-the-table infra you didn't care too much about anyway. By 2004 they were moving out of the closet, so to speak. Then those machines became more important because more was being done with them and were considered "just as good" as any other OS. Developers that had experience, with their MSFT certs in hand, were cheaper too. It was a slow progression to eat into the corporate marketshare. By 2006 virtual machines were ubiquitous and you could run MSFT virtualized. Many companies do that by default today for workspace controls. I have never and would never choose to use MSFT products (including Azure) for business critical infra. MSFT acquiring Github was great for them, and the death of it for me. I'm probably an old outlier, but I 'member.

          • ninjalanternshkan hour ago
            > PC game developers, DAW, CAD, Adobe

            Right, those are all desktop applications. Microsoft has long owned that market.

            I said “internet developers” meaning web sites, servers, apps, etc. Microsoft’s early offerings in that space, plus all the pain they inflicted with Internet Explorer, is what took years to overcome.

      • krupanan hour ago
        They went from demonizing open source software to buying GitHub, releasing their own open source software (including VSCode), and hosting Linux on Azure. Huge changes! But of course it ends up being another Embrace and Extend move by the masters of that tactic
        • an hour ago
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      • bitwize3 hours ago
        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.
        • danlugo922 hours ago
          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
          • hparadizan hour ago
            Both things can be true. VSCode did help us get to the point where I can use it on Linux, MacOS, or Windows and have a lot interoperability. It's the typical cycle. All it takes is a couple people to get their hands on managing the code to turn anything into garbage.
          • krupanan hour ago
            Lol, yep! That actually goes way back before 2010. It probably started in the early 90's, at least
      • discordance2 hours ago
        Remember “Microsoft <3 Linux”
        • hirvi742 hours ago
          I tried my hardest to block that out of my memory. Everyone knew their fingers were crossed behind their backs.
          • anonymarsan hour ago
            I think it's true though. They don't care about Windows anymore, that's plain as day. Most of their software is now cross-platform. Who cares about Windows if you are selling Azure instead and people can run Linux on that?
    • an hour ago
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    • giancarlostoro4 hours ago
      Its even worse in my eyes, they dont even offer a model they themselves maintain.
    • pjc505 hours ago
      The only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?
    • cjonas2 hours ago
      Claude code not supporting specifying an alternate location to look for agent skills is another example.
    • avd2013 hours ago
      The thing the annoys me the most (to use polite language) is that product design went off the window with the AI craze. You could probably ship actual products that actual people would want to use, but instead everyone wants to turn everything into a chatbot, as if chatbots are the pinnacle of user interface, the crabs of software, the purpose, goal, and telos of technology. It drives me nuts.
    • fuzzy_biscuit4 hours ago
      Not that surprising when you consider the monumental investments. It's heinous but right in line with modern corporate business ethics.
    • krainboltgreene5 hours ago
      > 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.

      • ryandrake5 hours ago
        These next few years are the real turning point. If they are right about AI and robotic workforces, then it's checkmate--they don't need us anymore, and we're next for the furnace. If they're wrong... well, I don't know... Will there be any consequences? Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.
        • le-mark4 hours ago
          Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago.

          Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.

          AI companies are in trouble.

          • heelix27 minutes ago
            One of the double edge swords I see is devs/evangelists pushing agentic coding are playing the 'good enough' statement. If that is true and those asking for software can live with good enough AI code, the moment the free local models hit that level the party is over in the continual push to the premium tip of the spear models.
          • storus4 hours ago
            I see one profitable enterprise for AI that involves spying on everyone, managing their lives (or otherwise) tightly, automating foreign conquests and needing to make only the top decisions while delegating everything else, like a king. I can see a group or one could say a class of people that would happily invest in such future.
            • smaudet4 hours ago
              Exactly. I keep saying, AI is not useful to us. There will be no AI companies.

              Even this supposed profitable enterprise, the people involved are absolutely too moronic to be able to control the thing they try to invent, it will just be a matter of time before it turns around and eliminates them as well...

          • thephyber4 hours ago
            Not all AI companies are the same.

            Some are piling on masses of debt to built capacity (eg. Oracle). Others are just reinvesting the profits from the rest of their company (eg. Google, Meta).

            Anthropic’s moat is their best tool, Claude Code.

            OpenAI’s moat is the brand of ChatGPT, once the fastest growing app in the history of the world.

            It’s possible that open weight models keep pace, but it’s also possible that the investment to train them becomes prohibitively expensive and open weight models cease to keep pace with the large foundation model companies.

            • 2ndorderthought3 hours ago
              I really don't think open models will lose. I think they are cheaper to train because they have to be more efficient than the monstrosities we have now.

              There is no theory that says the current frontier models cannot exist in models with 1/100th the compute waste ;). When we start trending in that direction, and oh wow we truly are, there will be no reason for these services. You could run them on your own hardware without serious investments.

              The moat openai and anthropic have is them among others have attempted to buy all of the computer hardware for the next two years. That's intentional. They know the only existential threat to them is anyone coming up with a way to do this better than them. It's already happened and it's going to become more and more divergent.

              • drivebyhootingan hour ago
                I’m interested in learning more about your theory that these models can be trained more cheaply. Is anyone doing it from scratch, rather than adversarial distillation?
                • 2ndorderthought36 minutes ago
                  It is a lot cheaper to train a 27b model such as qwen3.6 which you can even vibe code or agentic code with than it is to train a 1t+ parameter model. It runs on a single commodity GPU for goodness sake

                  It's not a theory. These smaller models that are coming out are huge advances for the field.

                  I can't comment on companies training practices. That would be proprietary stuff I guess. I think the claims that the advances being made are due to distillation alone are completely unfair. The advances alone are not just data.

            • matthewdgreen3 hours ago
              Open weight models will keep pace because capable open-weight models are China's strategy for preventing a closed takeover of AI by the West.
              • thephyber2 hours ago
                US megatechs stole copyrighted data to train their. Hyper expensive models.

                Chinese megatechs stole copyrighted data AND trained their models on derivative / synthetic data that came from the US foundation models.

                I’m happy Chinese foundation model trainers were able to use Huawei (homegrown) hardware to train their models (also because having Nvidia dominate that sector is terrible for competition), but if Chinese megatech companies are just deriving their open weights models from US companies, then this is just an IP theft exercise.

          • pfdietz4 hours ago
            What does their patent moat look like?
            • CamperBob23 hours ago
              Google owns the core transformer patent(s), for one thing, e.g. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en.

              I haven't read the claims, so I don't know how easy it will be to work around them. This particular one seems to cover encoder-decoder networks, so it's not necessarily applicable to later LLM implementations. But I'd be amazed if Google didn't have several other relevant patents in their arsenal.

        • thephyber4 hours ago
          There will always be jobs for private security, firefighters, and utility repairmen to protect / restore the data centers when people inevitably attack them.

          There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.

          • krainboltgreene3 hours ago
            Why will there always be these jobs, if the technofascists are right? They're creating enslaved sentience. Even the class traitor police want a union, fight for more pay.

            What's uniquely un-automate-able about those jobs in their dream future?

            • thephyber2 hours ago
              Never underestimate the capabilities of a desperate human.
        • HeavyStorm4 hours ago
          I guess if they are wrong the world economy crashes and burn again, because they wasted all these shiny dollars on infra build out. It's lose lose.
        • rsynnott4 hours ago
          Initially I assumed that when the bubble burst, some VCs would go bust, Oracle would go bust, a few hyperscalers would take a significant haircut but carry on, and life would pretty much go on. However there's now sufficient dodgy AI-related debt making its way onto the debt markets that the bubble burst could be a lot messier, and it may be more than a few percent.
          • nz3 hours ago
            Wouldn't mind a repeat of 2008, if it means that Oracle goes out of business.
        • fragmede4 hours ago
          A few percent of your net worth, when you're sitting on top of a pile of gold like a dragon on a yacht is one thing, but when you're a retiree, and you're on a fixed income, living off the proceeds from an annuity and a reverse mortgage, and inflation in all its forms is eating into the plan you had, and you don't have any backup, yes there will be consequences!
        • bdangubic4 hours ago
          > Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.

          the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.

      • nz4 hours ago
        People (well, American people (disclosure, I am an American)), used to be scared/worried that Silicon Valley will eventually move to Bangalore or Shenzhen, because of wage-discrepancies, and so on -- and it is not a totally unreasonable concern, considering that the _Silicon_ part of Silicon Valley has been slowly relocated to Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and a few others. At this point, maybe we should start pushing that the _rest_ of Silicon Valley gets relocated somewhere else, too.

        It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.

        • krupan42 minutes ago
          If you have worked in Silicon Valley you know that Bangalore and Shenzhen came here ;)

          In all seriousness, the silicon is still designed in Silicon Valley but maybe you don't hear about that as much? Broadcom, Qualcomm, Intel, Samsung, AMD, Nvidia, etc. all have a huge presence there still.

        • 2ndorderthought2 hours ago
          No country would want them.
      • outside12345 hours ago
        • 2ndorderthought4 hours ago
          One things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI.

          We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.

          • sdevonoes4 hours ago
            Didn’t get the “scary” part. I also keep my entertainment to the minimum dependencies possible. I try to rely on stuff I own: music cds, iso videogames + emulators, physical books or ebooks (thanks Anna), exercise outdoors… ditching streaming like netflix/youtube, buying crap on amazon, uber, etc
            • thephyber4 hours ago
              Scary = “if I have no future prospects for work”

              It’s the combination of AI changing the workplace, the large techs shedding double digit headcount, recruiting / hiring departments being so broken by the AI arms race hitting job applications, and the macro business environment generally being on the downward slope at the moment.

            • 2ndorderthought3 hours ago
              Scary part is not having a job right now that's all. It's not scary walking around getting more vitamin d
        • whattheheckheck4 hours ago
          This feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it
      • pron4 hours ago
        Turns out it's not infinitely spawnable after all.
        • krainboltgreene3 hours ago
          There's a lot of flaws with their fantasy world, that's not even the most prominent one.
    • neloxan hour ago
      Sent from iPhone
    • registeredcornan hour ago
      What did Command+G do in OSX? Online results are saying it "advances to the next search result after doing find". In other OS', that's just the enter key, if I am understanding the context correctly.
      • rsynnottan hour ago
        In MacOS it advances to the next search result _even if the search widget is not currently open_.
    • lpcvoid5 hours ago
      AI is the ultimate grifting tool, grifters gonna grift.
      • grebc5 hours ago
        5 years ago it was blockchain & NFT’s.

        Same hypers just moved to different technology.

        • 2ndorderthought4 hours ago
          In my circles it literally was the same people. Instead of trying to get me to buy ETH they started talking only via LLMs. Unsurprisingly we aren't in touch anymore... Maybe they are happier with their chatbots, I'll never know that's for sure
          • furyofantares2 hours ago
            I'm intensely curious, since you know they're grifters, why are they in your circles? I guess maybe you don't mean circles the way I'm thinking and more the whims of algorithms?
            • 2ndorderthought2 hours ago
              No I mean social circles

              Because I am too nice and even though every conversation had an element of grift there was still a conversation. Most of them are lost, or struggling with their identity. Yes there's some greed but half of them just want to fit in somewhere and they aren't technical geniuses despite loving technology. I like people like that, of course with out the grift.

              That said we don't keep in touch anymore. I do miss them though. I'm something like an abused dog that has seen too many things in their life to not look past all ugliness and see someone's inside. I hang around a lot of hurt people because í want them to have a safe person they can come to if they choose to heal.

              Wow that's personal. I should stop posting here and go find some new friends.

            • grebcan hour ago
              People get sucked into all sorts of schemes or ideas.

              I never said grifters but a fair share of my social circle pumped crypto’s/nft’s when they bought some(small amounts but whatever).

              Same people just can’t shut up about AI/LLM’s. I don’t care your LLM helped you generate an outlook email address export tool when a quick google reveals outlook can export the email address natively with just a few clicks.

        • PyWoody4 hours ago
          All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.
          • ExoticPearTree4 hours ago
            > All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.

            Some people made a lot of money off of those platforms. Everything was a nice story, but once you dug just a wee bit... smoke and mirrors.

            • PyWoody4 hours ago
              There were definitely honest people trying to make a difference but they were unfortunately _vastly_ overshadowed by grifters.
        • thesmtsolver24 hours ago
          Yep, 25 years ago it was the web. And remember the great electricity grift 100 years ago. And horseless carriage grifters like Ford!
          • grebc3 hours ago
            Yeah, you probably said web3 was going to change the web too.
            • hparadizan hour ago
              Don't stick your head in the sand just cause one fad didn't play out.
      • TeriyakiBomb4 hours ago
        See how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship.

        I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh

        • OutOfHere4 hours ago
          If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.
          • TeriyakiBomb4 hours ago
            I said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth.

            Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not.

            These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.

            • c-cube2 hours ago
              That's very uncharitable. Crypto has been extremely useful for all sorts of grifters and enabled separating fools from their money at true web scale.
              • cozzyd19 minutes ago
                Indeed, it would be difficult for Iran to receive payment for passage through the straight or Hormuz without crypto or fir North Korea's ransomwwre economy to be so lucrative.
            • OutOfHere4 hours ago
              [flagged]
              • TeriyakiBomb4 hours ago
                Ok. Well have fun. Bye.
              • thephyber3 hours ago
                Who is investing in NFTs today?

                Who is building their company using permission-less blockchain as the database? The average person still uses a bank checking account, not replacing it with a crypto account.

                I haven’t heard of any progress on tokens in the Governance direction.

                Stablecoins without a public audit trail have so far stayed relevant, but there are several which are suspiciously reminiscent of the mistakes that SBF made.

                We all see the transfer of funds and the ostensible store of wealth when it comes to buying influence or presidential pardons. Those of us not wearing crypto-colored glasses don’t see the promise that VCs sold us on the industry 5-10 years ago.

                • OutOfHere3 hours ago
                  I never spoke about NFTs nor do I have to speak about them, not today and not ever, so save your bait. It's in the same way that you didn't speak about bank bailouts, so I won't bait you into it.

                  Most people obviously use multiple accounts of different types. Those who have crypto wallets will never reveal them to you in the interest of their privacy.

                  Stablecoin firms make so much cash via interest that they're easily over-capitalized.

                  If you're foolish enough to be manipulated by VC interests, that's your own fault. I would focus on the tech, not on what VCs want you to believe. This applies generally, irrespective of the sector. I don't know why this is hard to understand.

                • nothinkjustai2 hours ago
                  NFTs are stupid. But I have a feeling as governments default on their debt and economies collapse in the next few decades cryptocurrencies will be of increasing importance.
                  • LtWorf38 minutes ago
                    Cryptocurrencies are now useless, considering how openai and similar companies have enough compute to highjack them and the AI thing might not work out at all…
    • buzzerbetrayed5 hours ago
      > There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX

      Have we been using the same Google?

      • dwedge4 hours ago
        Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.

        Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.

        Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?

        • phatfish4 hours ago
          If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.
          • rsynnott4 hours ago
            Chrome is a now-somewhat-archaic term for GUI (or specifically the actual elements of the GUI, not the concept), and Netscape/Mozilla did use the term a lot. Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).
            • neilv3 hours ago
              > Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars

              FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.

              Besides the use of chrome by Netscape/Mozilla that you mention, roughly around that time I heard it used by HCI people to refer flashy GUI design for cosmetics rather than function, and specifically to changes in a particular MacOS version.

              I wonder whether Netscape/Mozilla jokingly then used it as a term for the GUI toolkit "trim" around the browser page. Given that this was a transition to the important stuff being on the Web page, rather than your computer. And/or whether Google did.

              • Findecanor4 minutes ago
                Between Netscape Navigator and Firefox, their web browser was called simply "Mozilla". It supported GUI themes in XML with images which were officially called "Chrome". Mozilla also hosted user-contributed themes on a web site called "Chrome Zone".

                The browser was considered slow and bloated however, and when Firefox came, its lack of theme support was perceived as part of it having been de-bloated.

              • pseudalopexan hour ago
                > FWIW, before Google Chrome, Firefox was originally Firebird (changed for name collision reasons), and Mozilla had broken off the rest of the Netscape-ish "communications suite" into Thunderbird, both arguably named after cars.

                Mozilla named the web program Phoenix for rebirth. A company objected. Mozilla renamed it Firebird because phoenix was a fire bird. They named the mail program Thunderbird for similarity of Firebird.

                • neilvan hour ago
                  Thanks, I forgot about Phoenix.
      • krupan34 minutes ago
        This comment and a few others here make me feel old and sad for the people too young to remember that time. Yes, Google was an enormous breath of fresh air when it came out. 1000% better UI and features than the competition. Search was incredible. Gmail was a revelation. The whole company culture was night and day compared to the stodgy old tech companies like IBM. Just mind blowingly awesome. And then maps?? How did they even do that? The tech world felt entirely fresh and new and hopeful.
        • parineum27 minutes ago
          They basically revolutionized the web with the JavaScript V8 engine in chrome. Before them, JavaScript performance was so bad you had to have a really light touch with it.
      • HeavyStorm5 hours ago
        We have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.
      • rsynnott4 hours ago
        Admittedly, it's a while ago. But original gmail, say, really did put a huge amount of effort into it.
      • frizlab5 hours ago
        Some people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.
        • ninjalanternshk3 hours ago
          If you had been a Yahoo user when Google launched, you’d understand.
    • AlexandrB4 hours ago
      > Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

      "Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.

  • yankohr5 hours ago
    This feels like the modern version of 'Sent from my iPhone' but much more invasive. Git commits are legal and technical records. Falsifying who authored a piece of code just to pump up AI usage stats is a huge breach of trust and it is disappointing to see Microsoft prioritize branding over the integrity of the developer's log. I expect my IDE to record what happened, not what the marketing department wants people to think happened.....
    • tln4 hours ago
      Absolutely, messing with commits is more invasive than messages. It gets worse:

      "Sent from my iPhone" appears in the authoring view, and you can delete it.

      Co-authored-by: NEVER appears in the commit message UI - it is added without the user even seeing it.

    • Esophagus42 hours ago
      And also those early Spotify days where Spotify would automatically post what you’re listening to to your Facebook wall.

      I’ve always seen that practice of using the user as your recommendation lever without their consent as unethical.

    • 40 minutes ago
      undefined
    • polski-g4 hours ago
      Good point. That fake commit addendum means that the entire commit contents would not be under copyright protection. AI generated code is not currently copyrightable.
      • bdangubic4 hours ago
      • whattheheckheck4 hours ago
        Is thos actually decided yet? Closest thing was the image generation cases. What's your go to source for this?
      • hirvi742 hours ago
        Outside this instance, how can one prove code was AI generated beyond a reasonable doubt? Also, do you (or anyone else) know how much AI/copied-code has to be modified for it to be considered independent?

        If AI generates code, and one just renames some variables/method signatures, then what?

        • tyrean hour ago
          > how can one prove code was AI generated beyond a reasonable doubt?

          Subpoena the provider they use.

          Even if they don’t retain the full context, they have to save API calls for billing and analytics. If you’re clauding for the hour up to and after the commit, one can reasonably assume you built it with (if not exclusively by) AI.

      • jiveturkey4 hours ago
        It doesn't mean that. A Co-Authored-By header isn't a legal signature or legal assertion of AI generated code.
    • Gibbon14 hours ago
      One could argue that Co-Authored by Copilot means 'not under copyright'
      • Aurornis3 hours ago
        The headline literally says the line is being inserted regardless of usage, which makes it easy to argue that it’s entirely meaningless as an indicator of AI use at all.
        • Gibbon12 hours ago
          If you can get AI to write your slop is it really socially valuable enough to justify copyright?

          Even before AI copyrighting software was questionable.

          • 2 hours ago
            undefined
      • VanTheBrand3 hours ago
        Yeah the current guidance from US copyright office is that if it were said to be solely authored by copilot it would not be eligible for copyright. If it were said to be solely authored by human A (who happened to use co-pilot) the elements and arrangement of it not generated by co-pilot would be copyrightable. I’m not sure the copyright office has released guidance on attempting to register AI as a co-author I assume the registration would be rejected but you’d be able to re-submit as sole Human author.
  • dmitriv2 hours ago
    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 when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI. I'll work on fixing those and meanwhile revert default to off in 1.119 update.

    I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions - please feel free to reach me directly (my alias @microsoft.com) or open an issue on GitHub. Happy to answer anything here as well.

    • alemanek13 minutes ago
      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 added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.

      This kind of thing being released speaks to a greater disfunction over there. Not a good look at all and I am not a Microsoft or AI hater. But my commit messages are not where you move fast and break things

    • somebehemothan hour ago
      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.
    • lightdot23 minutes ago
      > 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.

      What metric did Microsoft use to assess that VS Code users "expect" their commits to have unsolicited messages added to them?

      > Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI.

      Did you discuss adding these messages with your legal department?

      What is Microsoft's position on adding such authorship statements to the code Microsoft did not author?

      Or is Microsoft stating that using LLM assistants makes Microsoft a co-author of the code?

      Does Microsoft have copyright claims on the code if LLM assistants are used at any time during it's creation?

    • jamesbfban hour ago
      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...

    • schwede40 minutes ago
      Why does the commit editor hide the coauthored message? Why not pre-populate the text field and users take or leave it when committing?
    • mellosouls21 minutes ago
      Thanks for facing this head-on here; mistakes happen.

      I think the default to on should also be reconsidered regardless. The assessment (co-authored by AI) may be valid but the assumption the user wants that advertising is exactly that, an assumption, and a dubious one at that.

    • aaaronic15 minutes ago
      Brave man. RIP your inbox.
    • nhinck221 minutes ago
      > a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code

      Literally who?

    • an hour ago
      undefined
    • p-e-wan hour ago
      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 an environment where something like that wouldn’t have been red-flagged in three seconds by anyone who took even a casual glance. I’d honestly be embarrassed if such a proposal even made it into a public pull request for my organization, nevermind that pull request getting merged.

    • jibal27 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • ddkto5 hours ago
    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).

    • HeavyStorm4 hours ago
      That's pretty standard review practice in there by now.
    • stefan_4 hours ago
      I also liked the bot posting screenshot diffs that are all false positives, while apparently not capturing the default change (is it not in some menu somewhere?)
  • artyom4 hours ago
    To everyone who bought the "developer-friendly" Microsoft of VSCode fame from a few years ago: this is what they forever did, and forever will do.

    This company has been pulling these tricks since the early 90s.

    If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.

    • movedxan hour ago
      You’re forgetting the fact that the newer generations coming into the industry don’t know that. They don’t even know what a VHS tape is and some don’t even know what a DVD is — this isn’t a problem it’s just their baseline is different from ours. Global warming is an example of this: newer generations see today’s conditions as normal but we older generations see them as broken and a problem.

      To be direct about this: this is actually our fault they fell for this. It’s your fault too. We’re the ones building the future for the next generation/s, so whatever “tricks” they fall for are created by our generation (to extract or generate wealth, amongst other things.)

      That’s on us to do better through education and fighting back.

      • squigzan hour ago
        The younger generations aren't really that stupid. They know what a DVD is for gosh sake.

        They also know the conditions they have to endure - economic, climate, whatever - are not normal or okay. They're well aware of who to blame for those.

    • joohwan2 hours ago
      > If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.

      We don’t need snarky comments like this, especially when the technology in question is so pervasive and takes a lot of cognitive effort to avoid. The blame lies solely with Microsoft.

    • ninjagoo2 hours ago
      The very young do not always do as they are told.

      If one hasn't been personally betrayed yet, it is easy to minimize or ignore the warnings of others who have been through the predatory/anticompetitive, EEE, stack ranking, etc. eras of MS.

      • artyom2 hours ago
        I agree with you in very general terms, but I'm not sure you can reach the level of "market share" VSCode has had the last few years with just the very young.
    • cheschire3 hours ago
      You may be surprised to learn some of the employed adults on this site were born after the 90’s.
      • justinclift3 hours ago
        Unfortunately, quite a few of these young adults ignored the people who lived through it last time and were repeatedly warning them about it.
      • vermilingua3 hours ago
        And hopefully those employed adults have done their due diligence and read some history.
    • thiht2 hours ago
      Ok but I’ve used VSCode for almost 10 years, got mad at this once, and disabled it instantly. This sucks, but maybe don’t overreact?
      • jagged-chisel23 minutes ago
        - Automatically activated audio cues (purportedly for accessibility) without consideration for users with auditory sensitivity; continued to release changes that would override attempts to disable the unwanted sound; dismissed with "but how else could we possibly notify people that we added the feature?"

        - Refusing for over seven years to offer a simple UI to clear "issues" pane, instead blaming plugin authors for not 'owning' the content. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/66982

        Microsoft hasn't cared about the actual users of VSCode for a very long time.

      • artyom2 hours ago
        I'd like my tools to not have a time-bomb attached to them, no matter if it takes 10 years to explode.

        And honestly I think this case is just a perpetually clueless manager getting over-joyous with vibecoding (to the point of being marveled at changing two lines of code without blowing everything up).

        It's probably going to be reverted in the coming days. Which doesn't change the fact that it's a very Microsoft way of operating.

        • abustamam2 hours ago
          Yeah, a company can only be shitty and "fix" their mistakes for so long until the general public realizes that the company doesn't have its customers best interests at heart.
      • abustamam2 hours ago
        Just because you can opt out doesn't mean that they're not shitty for defaulting you to opt in.
        • bigstrat200342 minutes ago
          It is certainly bad behavior that Microsoft did this. But it's irrational to jump from there to "this is what they always did and always will do" as OP did. Corporations are not unchangeable monoliths, and it was perfectly reasonable to use Microsoft tools when they were acting decently towards their users. Now that they have turned user-hostile, it makes sense to avoid them until they learn their lesson, and so on.

          People act like a corporation has character traits, as a person does. But it doesn't. You can't strongly predict future behavior based on the present the way you can with a person, so it makes no sense to have seething eternal hatred for a company.

      • 2 hours ago
        undefined
  • MaKey5 hours ago
    FYI, they changed the default of 'git.addAICoAuthor' to 'chatAndAgent' afterwards: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880

    So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'

    • nusl3 hours ago
      Changed back or not, this demonstrates that they're either willing to make sweeping changes like this that hurt a massive number of users, or that they're incompetent to the point of not realising the impact of the first change. They'd have had to just blindly make the change, since the original PR was approved and merged within the same minute by the original author (no additional eyes, at least that we can see), or ignore user complaints and make it anyway. Both cases demonstrate terrible stewardship of VSCode.
      • 2 hours ago
        undefined
    • dbeley3 hours ago
      This should be higher, as this dates from 5 days ago I wonder why OP didn't bother to mention this follow-up
      • indrora3 hours ago
        To be honest, I didn't see the follow up. It just incensed me enough that they would do that to begin with.

        Right up there with Zed being pretty open that they siphon your code through their API surface and have a "Just Trust Us Bro" data retention policy, along with no way to turn the collaboration features off.

        - OP

    • 4 hours ago
      undefined
  • SwellJoe6 hours ago
    "Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.
    • bandramian hour ago
      Huh. I always thought the point of "Sent from my iPhone" (or the earlier "Sent from my Blackberry") was that it indicated "I don't have access to my desktop and file server right now so don't expect me to send that file".
      • bandramian hour ago
        I once was involved with booking the actor Kal Penn for an event and his signature line was "Sent from your mom's house". I always loved that.
    • ssl-35 hours ago
      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
      • SwellJoe5 hours ago
        But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.
        • ssl-35 hours ago
          I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.

          But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.

        • TeriyakiBomb4 hours ago
          100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.

          I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors

      • SwellJoe5 hours ago
        Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.
        • projektfu5 hours ago
          It's the masochism of downloading images at 2400 baud.
    • djyde5 hours ago
      However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.
      • blaze335 hours ago
        Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.
      • manquer5 hours ago
        Doubly so, because you are being used as ad-channel and not being compensated for it either.
    • abustamam2 hours ago
      I don't really send emails anymore but when I actually used email to keep in touch with friends (during the interesting bit of time between smart phones becoming mainstream and SMS and other messaging services becoming more popular than email), I changed my signature to be "Sent from your iPhone" even though I used an android and mainly sent emails from my computer, just to be an edgy teenager. Got some interesting responses from that.

      It's interesting to see how communication, digital and otherwise, has evolved over time.

    • k8sToGo5 hours ago
      Microsoft already does this with their mobile Outlook. Sent by Outlook Android / iOS on the bottom of the message.
      • chrisweekly5 hours ago
        Huge difference: the commit signature may not have had anything to do with Copilot, whereas email sent by mobile Outlook was... sent by Outlook.
    • frizlab5 hours ago
      But you can see it and remove it before sending. It’s definitely not the same.
      • nsxwolf4 hours ago
        Sometimes it randomly pushes without me asking, so I have a mess to clean up.
    • sunaookami5 hours ago
      Does anybody else remember Tapatalk? They did the same with signatures in forums.
    • sleepybrett5 hours ago
      "sent from my iphone" originally meant more than just "i have a fancy phone that lets me send email" in the early days it meant "I'm not at my desk right now."
  • srikanthsastry5 minutes ago
    Determining AI provenance is really tricky and difficult when you have so many different ways to author code. Looks like VS Code has decided that by stamping all code as AI generated, it is more likely to be right than wrong. Some PM must have declared that false negatives are a lot more dangerous than false positives when it comes to AI provenance tracking
  • mister_mort5 hours ago
    This is pumping someone's metrics up inside of Microsoft, somewhere.

    The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?

    • 6504 hours ago
      A Principal Software Engineer at Microslop merged this - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitriy-vasyura-9191611/

      This is the author of the MR - https://github.com/cwebster-99 - A Product Manager at Microslop

      I've routinely spoken on the uselessness, and oftentimes detriment of product managers in tech.

      The dearth of leadership driving for vanity metrics like PMs writing code doesn't help either.

      • ArmadilloGang3 hours ago
        I can’t access that LinkedIn link without going through their Persona ID process, which requires all kinds of PII.

        > LinkedIn users attempting identity verification may be unknowingly handing sensitive personal data to Persona Identities Inc., a company that distributes information to government agencies, credit bureaus, utilities, and mobile providers.

        ^ Link from a LinkedIn page I found on a Kagi search.

        I can view some LinkedIn pages but not others without logging in.

        Even though I’ve never posted to LinkedIn it only use it as a public résumé, my account was flagged as needing identity verification. I’m pretty sure this happened a year or two ago when I changed my email address from one domain I owned to another domain I owned.

        I’ve never been able to log in since then, and there is no support path. The only available way past it is to simply submit all the info to Persona.

        • dmitriv2 hours ago
          I'm here, what would you like to know?
          • 8 minutes ago
            undefined
          • bsuvc2 hours ago
            Why did you lock the comments on the GitHub issue?

            (Edit: I meant to say PR, not issue...)

            • rmunn35 minutes ago
              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've seen that before on other issue comment threads. The repo owner says "Hey everyone, if you want an issue fixed, please upvote the issue with a thumbs up". And many people don't read that, and instead post "Please fix this" comments without giving a thumbs-up to the issue. So, 1) the repo owner doesn't get to use the "sort issues by # of thumbs-up reactions" to see the priority of that issue, and 2) everyone who has subscribed to the issue gets spammed with a message that's useless to them.

              Since nearly all the new comments had become "me too"-style comments, which should have just been a thumbs-up on a previous comment in order to reduce spam, I feel like locking the issue thread was the right move at that point, to stop people from receiving yet more unnecessary email in their already-overflowing inboxes.

            • dmitrivan hour ago
              [dead]
      • gopher_space4 hours ago
        The role feels like it’s borne out of a desire to see employees as fungible.
      • dmitriv2 hours ago
        I'm here in case you have something to say to me directly.
    • k8sToGo5 hours ago
      Isn't that someone the person who created the PR? "Product Manager at @microsoft working on VS Code and GitHub Copilot!" it says on her profile
    • harambee4ever2 hours ago
      My first thought when I read this was that it was accidental. But the title of the PR looks like that they aren't even trying to hide it
    • whynotmaybe5 hours ago
      Isn't it also cause they want to tag those commit so that they don't feed it into copilot training?
    • telchior5 hours ago
      That someone saw Google's claim that 75% of their code is written with AI and said "hold my beer".

      Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

      • liquid_thyme5 hours ago
        >No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.

        You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s

  • low_tech_love5 hours ago
    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?

    • tln4 hours ago
      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.

      • bojan4 hours ago
        I genuinely think it's not ok even then. Copilot is a tool, one of many I use. That tool has no business polluting commit messages without my knowledge.

        The appended message isn't even adding any new information, as in this day and age a vast majority of commits is probably "co-authored" by an LLM.

        • tln3 hours ago
          I should have been clearer, the hidden addition is never ok.

          If I ask Claude to write a commit message, it will inserted a co-author line (and an ad), but I can see it and disapprove, add a counter instruction to CLAUDE.md etc

      • AlienRobot4 hours ago
        Glorified autocomplete, syntax reminder and random snippet generator thinks it's co-authoring things.
    • an hour ago
      undefined
  • lagniappe2 hours ago

        microsoft locked as spam and limited conversation to collaborators 6 minutes ago
  • golem1443 minutes ago
    I miss in this whole thread why this is happening. Presumably to be transparent whether code has been co-written by AI?

    What's in it for Microsoft?

    If we accept that AI can't copyright or own IP rights on something, then why? I have a sneaky suspicion that there's some lobbying in the works to overturn that ruling going forward. In the past, it was OK to build models from copyrighted data etc one might have found on the wayside. But, in the future, no such thing for you. Everything generated by the AIs will then belong (at least partly) to the megacorps (maybe THEY can co-own the copyright if the AI cannot). Nice pulling-up-the ladder if true.

    This could also be a move against other countries' IP position.

    I've seen the explanation from dimitriv [1], but I am not convinced. These markings achieve very little, as people can clearly work around it by copy-pasting code from another place, or using other companies tools, like claude code or antigravity (or, not even use the GUI)

    I suppose the answer might just be "don't attribute to malice ...", even if Microsoft has proven us wrong before; they generally know exactly what they are doing strategically.

    I guess, in a few years we will know.

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dmitriv#47991835

  • amarant5 hours ago
    Microsoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.
    • dd8601fn5 hours ago
      I know you didn’t mean it that way, but boy did that make me feel old.

      Anyone else remember the bill gates borg category on slashdot?

      • willhslade5 hours ago
        Indeed fellow traveller. I do.
    • OutOfHere4 hours ago
      There is more of it that's going on. For me, Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard app sabotages the use of a competing search engine (DuckDuckGo) in Firefox in Android for me. When typing a multi-word double-quoted search phrase, it doesn't allow it to be typed correctly.
  • mrcartmeneses6 hours ago
    Next it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza
    • Qem5 hours ago
      Next Microsoft will sue you to get a share of revenues and ownership as co-author, if your product ever makes success.
    • k8sToGo5 hours ago
      But only if you watched this 1 min Segment of today's sponsor...

      Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer

    • IdontKnowRust5 hours ago
      This will be so true hahaha
    • dessimus5 hours ago
      More like Carl's Jr.: Fuck you! We're eating.
  • adithyassekhar29 minutes ago
    Wow that pr itself looks amateurish. I reported this a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
  • docheinestagesan hour ago
    Even large companies like Anthropic and Microsoft keep pushing out features without proper code and/or product review. This has become a bottleneck in software engineering.
  • digitaltrees2 hours ago
    This is especially hostile to users given that courts are ruling that AI written code can’t be copyrighted.

    When Hotmail inserted “sent using Hotmail” in emails as a growth hack it didn’t have legal consequences. This might.

  • csmantlean hour ago
    The PR author didn't even bother to properly capitalize their subject and add a description. What a double standard for code quality Macroslop is applying to internal vs. external contributions.
  • RandyOrion27 minutes ago
    Wow. Just like using ungoogled-chromium instead of chrome, lineage os instead of oem android, using vscodium instead of vscode is again justified. These decisions really are the ones that I'll never regret.

    In addition, using the word microslop instead of microsoft is again justified, too.

  • cozzyd5 hours ago
    My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.
    • signa112 hours ago
      640k … there is something poetic about that number.
      • cozzyd14 minutes ago
        I figure that's how much RAM I can expend for Microsoft products.
    • c0wb0yc0d3r4 hours ago
      Can you explain how this works? Doesn’t this also stop you from connecting to it over ssh via vs code?
      • cozzyd2 hours ago
        Yes that's the point. If vscode didn't insist on installing potentially gigabytes of blobs then this wouldn't be necessary.

        (I'm a vimmer anyway... And emacs is too bloated to fit too, conveniently.)

      • accelbred2 hours ago
        Sounds like a feature.
  • MkLouis5 hours ago
    Jeez, you can see many things wrong with this new all-in AI direction that Microsoft is taking. Commit by a product manager, who probably actually never digged through the code before…automated ai review not catching the problem, and the vibe codes pr introduction the error itself
    • 6504 hours ago
      This was merged by a Principal SWE though. Maybe overruled by leadership :)
  • sedatk5 hours ago
    Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.
    • snehesht5 hours ago
      To be precise,

      "git.addAICoAuthor": "off"

    • mgol942 hours ago
      Until they change it to „CoauthorAI” in next version. This shouldn’t be a default in the first place
    • 5 hours ago
      undefined
  • quink2 hours ago
    And here I’m thinking that my text editor should have zero interaction with anything git other than as a diff viewer.

    lazygit is text editor agnostic and works brilliantly to give some near perfect porcelain to git specifically. And it works the same with Ghostty, Terminal, zed, VS Code, any environment I happen to be in, while saving so many keystrokes.

  • throwaway815235 hours ago
    Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.
  • bsuvcan hour ago
    If your code is "co-authored by Copilot", does that then allow future AI to train on it without your consent?
  • stodor895 hours ago
    Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.
  • bg24an hour ago
    I have been in this situation. A major driving force is some kind of a demand from the leadership to see the KPI for the AI adoption. And this unfortunately is the easiest one to implement.

    The other aspect is virality. I think by now the implementing team should know that most people do not appreciate Claud inserting itself into the commit message. It's the job of the team to feed that to the leadership.

  • tokioyoyo5 hours ago
    At no point in time companies were so desperate for developer attention. It feels like the general consensus is it is a “winner takes it all” race, and everyone has to add as many dark patterns as possible to increase stickiness.
  • jagged-chiselan hour ago
    We got a positive response just before "microsoft locked as spam": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/310226#event-251003...
  • ryan-a5 hours ago
    Time to leave for something else if you haven't already, vscode has been good to us but this kind of behavior is only going to ramp up as Microsoft seeks to get a return on their AI investments.
  • holistio5 hours ago
    Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.
    • yNeolh5 hours ago
      That happens in most speech to text systems, even Superwhisper, Monologue and Wispr Flow. I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio and happens when there is silence. I guess it depends on the model but most of them are based on Whisper which has this problem
      • zugi5 hours ago
        > I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio

        Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"

        • 4 hours ago
          undefined
        • ikidd4 hours ago
          "Smash that Like button."
      • mr-wendel4 hours ago
        Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.
  • nclin_40 minutes ago
    It's your own fault for using anything made by microsoft at this point.
  • b4rtaz__5 hours ago
    This is really bad.
    • glitchc5 hours ago
      Should be the top comment for succintly summarizing the situation.
  • djoldman4 hours ago
    Looks like it comes into play for telemetry and here in actual commits:

    https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...

  • hparadizan hour ago
    This is why I never ever commit through the gui.
  • ninjahawk15 hours ago
    Great, here’s how to remove it from your commits:

    Run git commit --amend

    Your text editor will open. Delete the line: Co-authored-by: Github Copilot <noreply@github.com>

    Save and exit

    Force push the change: git push --force-with-lease

    • lpcvoid5 hours ago
      Or people could instead not use Microslop software, easy fix for the AI bullshit. But yeah of course you're technically right.
  • vb-8448an hour ago
    So what's next ... Is this a proof for when they are going to charge you a 30% commission on your sales for products build with their tools?
  • rwaksmunski5 hours ago
    Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.
  • fhn3 hours ago
    I've been hesitant to use Zed mostly because I didn't want to learn new key but last week, I finally jumped in and remapped to keys that I like. It works really well.
    • indrora3 hours ago
      FYI you should read Zed's FAQ on data retention.

      It's very "Trust Me Bro". My workplace has already banned Zed after legal review purely on the lack of any controls over the collaboration feature that gets turned on the instant that you log into Github with it.

  • matt3210an hour ago
    Adding anything to my commits or PRs or anything else is a deal breaker TBH
  • Animats5 hours ago
    Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?
    • Dylan168075 hours ago
      If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright.

      And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.

      • lelanthran4 hours ago
        > If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright

        How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?

        • Dylan16807an hour ago
          The bot (and therefore microsoft) doesn't get any copyright at all.
    • cookiengineer4 hours ago
      The real question is why Anthropic was able to use DMCA takedown requests "in good faith" against the Claude leaks when their own CTO claimed it is a 100% slopcoded codebase, and they themselves argue that all LLM generated code is transformed enough to not be copyrightable. Which they have to state without being able to turn back because they violated millions of book and software licenses during training.

      Make it make sense.

      • naruhodo3 hours ago
        Truth, law and consequences (for the capital class) are so last year.
      • ashirviskas3 hours ago
        What? Training is not inference. Reading books is not the same as writing.
    • redwall_hp5 hours ago
      The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent.

      Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop.

      I can't wait for:

      * The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent copyright for machine generated code.

      * The first company to get nailed to the wall for reverse engineering and replicating high profile copyrighted code, like Windows.

      • circuit104 hours ago
        Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool

        For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either

        "Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated

  • ozirus4 hours ago
    It's all because of ridiculous performance systems of some $BIGTECH$

    "Here's we increased number of commits by Copilot from X to Y, %Z increase"

  • KyleBerezin2 hours ago
    quote: "Thank you all for your feedback, professional or otherwise. Sorry about the regression. I will work on fixing this in 1.119.

    There is a number of issues with the Co-Author functionality:

    It should never have been enabled when disableAIFeatures is on. It should not add attribution to changes that were not done by AI. We need to make sure it receives a more test coverage before change the default. If you have additional (constructive) feedback, please ping me directly or open an issue."

  • chrysoprace5 hours ago
    Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?
  • 5 hours ago
    undefined
  • i3862 hours ago
    PMs at Microsoft have incredibly bad taste
    • Andrex2 hours ago
      I mean, they chose to work for Microsoft.
  • sourcegrift2 hours ago
    Co-authored-by iPhone
  • guluarte2 hours ago
    Seems like MS from the Gates/Ballmer era is back
  • thombles5 hours ago
    I saw this the other day and was pretty confused - I prefer to write my own commit messages and wondered if I’d accidentally let the AI do it this time. Nope, just MS changing things behind my back. Sigh.
  • bakugo4 hours ago
    Having to scroll through 3 screens worth of giant automated comments on the linked PR before seeing any comments written by humans is the cherry on top.

    So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.

  • rbbydotdev5 hours ago
    So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
  • awesome_dude5 hours ago
    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.

    • low_tech_love5 hours ago
      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?
      • dlivingston5 hours ago
        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.
      • JoshTriplett5 hours ago
        It's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)
      • Jtarii5 hours ago
        GCC isn't making editorial decisions.
      • 2 hours ago
        undefined
    • vunuxodo5 hours ago
      > it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad

      Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.

      Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.

      • awesome_dude4 hours ago
        I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?

        DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?

        • bigstrat200324 minutes ago
          You, and those others, are people. The clanker is not, and should not get the privileges of a person.
    • cess115 hours ago
      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?
      • awesome_dude4 hours ago
        I regularly link comments in my code pointing to the source of the code I have "cribbed"

        It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.

  • slowhadoken3 hours ago
    My early paranoia about corporate AI is really maturing. No one’s really laughing at me anymore either.
  • flipthefrog5 hours ago
    A lot of bitching about Microsoft here, for something Claude has been doing forever. I have a git hook that rejects any commit containing the line Co-authored by Claude
    • qezz5 hours ago
      That's a fair point, but claude code is not an editor (yet?), and when you use claude code, and allow it to commit things, it's almost certainly "co-authored by llm".

      Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.

    • aledujke4 hours ago
      Well claude does it if you ask it to commit instead of you, and it lets you review it, this is not the case with this feature - judging by the comments on PR. Sometimes it says co-authored by copilot even when the code is not generated by AI. Also it will never say co-authored by claude or whatever, always copilot. Also why would my IDE care about this and not the AI itself?
    • vultour5 hours ago
      Are you ashamed of other people finding out you used Claude? I think the co-authored-by bit should not be a setting at all, AI-generated code should be clearly identified.
      • sieve4 hours ago
        > AI-generated code should be clearly identified.

        Let AI autonomously produce code of a quality that I care about and I might consider giving it credit. I don't know how other people write code but I come up with an idea and use a multitude of LLMs to brainstorm a reasonably comprehensive spec that any reasonably competent person can read and produce a working program from, including a locally working Q2 quant of Qwen 3.6. Even Kimi is as good as Claude at most coding tasks, and I don't see why any single agent deserves any credit for my design.

        Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.

        • Paracompact4 hours ago
          > Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.

          They do, though, in the form of metadata.

          • sieve4 hours ago
            Do Adobe or Arri or Red get authorship credit for the work their hardware and software do on projects? After all, artists would not be able to produce a single pixel without them. In a similar vein, you could make the argument that modern farming is sitting on your ass in your modern tractor while software handles most of the work. Does John Deere get rights over a quarter/half your harvest?

            I am stuck between the luddites and "artisanal" coders on this one. LLMs are neither as smart/useful or as dumb/useless as people think. Unless your job involves producing useless garbage every single day, good software requires a lot of thought before the first line of code is even written. For those with serious domain knowledge, the thinking time can be compressed into minutes/hours rather than days/weeks it might take.

            LLMs are a tool. You either pay for it or you use the freely available ones on your own hardware. As long as the output is directed by my thinking, the output belongs to me. If it were up to me, I would abolish IPR (and even permanent ownership of land) as a category altogether, but that is a different discussion.

      • NateEag5 hours ago
        I think the Linux kernel's standard of disclosure via the "Assisted-By" trailer is the right move.

        Makes it clear you used a bullshit machine, without implying it's an author.

        ...assuming you think using them at all is a good move - I won't deny they have some utility (though I'd argue much lower than many seem to think), but I do presently believe they're a disaster for humanity.

        The ruination of the Internet with slop, the massive propagation of propaganda, and the insanely easy-to-wield tools for abuse are in no way worth the ability to accrue tech debt at 10x velocity (though to be clear, accruing tech debt can absolutely be a useful strategy, if one I personally dislike).

      • dangus5 hours ago
        Basically what you’re saying is that if AI does anything on your computer, anything the AI impacts you should lose control over. If the AI touched it at all in any way, big or small, you now lose ownership of the actions your computer takes (on open source tools, I might add).

        In case you need reminding of common sense, I’m supposed to be allowed to decide what my commit messages are because it’s my fucking computer.

        I prefer that my software is not a morality police.

      • bdangubic5 hours ago
        mind-boggling people are trying to hide this, tells you all you need to know about our “profession.” presence of that hook or the like in a place of business should be fireable offense
    • tomjakubowski4 hours ago
      I've never had Claude Code in VSCode add attribution to a commit when I didn't use it. VSCode is adding the attribution even when you have all copilot features disabled and therefore could not have used it.
    • logickkk12 hours ago
      I already added a pre-commit hook to strip this out. Having to defend myself from my own editor is absurd.
    • kafrofrite5 hours ago
      Please do share
      • conception5 hours ago
        Ask claude to “Write a hook for Claude code that rejects any get commit that includes “co-authored by Claude” in it”
      • bethekidyouwant5 hours ago
        Just ask Claude to write it..
  • the134 hours ago
    Default or mandatory gift authorship?
  • szmarczak2 hours ago
  • ninkendo5 hours ago
    > No description provided.

    Right because of course you wouldn’t provide an explanation for why such a change would be made.

    Providing zero description or background or explanation for why a change is made is probably the only thing that pisses me off as much as a pure AI-slop description of a change: your job in a PR description is to give the background for why a change is being made. Honestly, any PR which doesn’t do this should be insta-closed by policy. But it totally tracks with the level of quality I’d expect from the company in question.

  • coliveira5 hours ago
    This is not just a joke, it is a legal nightmare. You may be giving away the copyright ownership, or at least part of it, to Microsoft.
    • dwedge4 hours ago
      AI generated code is not copyrightable anyway. The only real question is how much "copiloting" you have to get ownership, and right now the courts seem to be heading towards it not mattering if AI was involved
  • wutwutwat2 hours ago
    Does anyone happen to know, what, if any, are the ownership/copyright/intellectual property liabilities and/or rights that come from a `co-authored by copilot/claude/codex/whatever`

    Right now these companies are dealing with legal troubles from taking other's code/IP without honoring the license or copyright.

    My theory that could be a bit of stretch is; if they can eventually replace all that copyright'd code that is trained into these models with versions their agent services created during the millions of uses daily, they can train future versions on code they wrote. If they hold any ownership stake or usage rights on that code, due to those co-authored lines, which are saying "this agent and by extension the company that owns it was a part of creating this code", they effectively will have laundered the license away from the original owners and removed any way to pursue legal action because they won't even be using the stuff stolen anymore, and worse yet, if they now have their own copyright or other legal grounds due to their agents co-authoring all new code, they could start going after smaller ai companies for the same thing individuals were going after them for.

    I know that's a pessimistic outlook, but I feel like the co-authored lines are being placed there for more than marketing exposure. It's a commit message after all, how much could that help marketing. It's the ownership/author attribution aspect that concerns me.

  • booleandilemma5 hours ago
    The day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.
  • bsuvc2 hours ago
    In typical Microsoft form, they locked further comments on the GitHub PR.
    • 3eb7988a166342 minutes ago
      I love a good dog-pile, but there is little constructive happening in that thread beyond variations of, "WTF?".
      • bsuvc14 minutes ago
        Who decides what is constructive?
  • bborud2 hours ago
    Microsoft is enshittifying VS Code. I have already started looking for a lifeboat.

    Imagine what this is going to look like in 2 years.

  • nisten2 hours ago
    just use vscodium (opensource vscode without microsoft's spyware) stop giving an increasingly incompetent org more control over your data ppl.

    https://vscodium.com/

    Claude amp, cline, kilo etc plugins all work great with it, for ssh Open Remote works great with it too.

  • tiberriver2563 hours ago
    Poor Courtney
  • alansaber4 hours ago
    Finally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up
  • ekjhgkejhgk4 hours ago
    Speaking of which, why does anybody use VS Code?

    https://vscodium.com/

    I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.

  • pelasaco5 hours ago
    Wasn’t it discussed here that no copyrights apply to code generated by AI? I’m asking myself whether adding "Co-authored-by: Copilot" means the code is not protected by the GPL, or even allows Microsoft to own your code...
  • 5 hours ago
    undefined
  • 6 hours ago
    undefined
  • 5 hours ago
    undefined
  • te_chris5 hours ago
    Claude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.
    • loufe4 hours ago
      There's a large gap between what they do (same env var disables this since the beginning) vs Microsoft bucking it's way through AI coauthorship credit in a multi potential author china shop, though.
    • flykespice3 hours ago
      That isn't the same thing.

      It's you're using AI tool to code, obviously the tool should be given due credits on the commits, for ethics.

      but in this case Microslop is branding any commits as "co-authored by Copilot", even if the user never used any AI tool.

      This is blatant attempt violation of commits authorship ethics and user rights.

  • morkalork5 hours ago
    Well, that's good news for all the developers working at companies with delusional management proclaiming "100% of code will be written by AI in 6 months"!
  • iqfareez2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • eddyaipt2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • c0balt5 hours ago
    Growth hacking at its best /s
  • Scarbutt5 hours ago
    "chat.disableAIFeatures": true
  • clutter555615 hours ago
    I got tired of Claude adding their signatures to my commits against my instructions (the settings schema changed at some point), so I added a commit-msg hook that blocks multi-line commits. Easy and works like a charm, and would block this sort of M$ intrusion.

    What a despicable behaviour from M$.

  • preommr5 hours ago
    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?

    • glitchc5 hours ago
      The editor wars never ended, and VSCode has been user hostile since inception. It came with unavoidable telemetry right out the gate.
    • opan5 hours ago
      vim and emacs are both still great choices.
      • marshray3 hours ago
        I've been using *nix and usenet since the early 1990's.

        I always thought "editor wars" was a particularly dumb in-joke among a small group and I feel sad when I see people who think it was ever more than that.

        The Wikipedia page cites "The Jargon File" as an authoritative source of truth. Ridiculous.

    • majormajor5 hours ago
      > WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?

      "Make a great free product so that we can enshittify it later" is an infamous MS playbook. Maybe nothing happened, maybe just the usual MS at work.

  • 2OEH8eoCRo05 hours ago
    If you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?
    • janice19995 hours ago
      Moved to Zed and recommended my team do the same.
    • 1dontknow4 hours ago
      Make sure to delete VSCode fully from any PC I have access to and annoy all my coworkers to get rid of it.
    • zzo38computer3 hours ago
      I would think that the thing to do about it (if you want to use VS Code at all; some people (such as myself) don't), should be to send a patch to prevent adding the Co-authored-by line if Copilot is disabled, so that it will only add that line if the Copilot is enabled.
    • preommr5 hours ago
      Turn it off and rage on social media.

      If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".

      • bigstrat200318 minutes ago
        Zed is a nonstarter for me as long as they install additional software (third party runtimes to run LSPs) without asking my permission. That isn't acceptable behavior.
      • glitchc5 hours ago
        Zed currently does not have a revenue stream. Ot's only a matter of time before the same shenanigans ensue.
        • janice19995 hours ago
          They're a commercial entity that sells AI plans and enterprise features.
          • TeriyakiBomb4 hours ago
            Honestly not sure how viable that is long term with the way the pricing kinda needs to go. I think the recent copilot price increase is just the tip of the iceberg.
        • msla5 hours ago
          Like how GNU Emacs is completely saturated with AI now?

          (That's sarcasm, in case anyone wants to pretend I'm being serious.)

          • grg04 hours ago
            Emacs is not VC-backed.
      • Scarbutt5 hours ago
        Unfortunately, Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish, Microsoft supported LSPs just work better in VSCode, they are better integrated, and Zed can't do anything about LSPs memory or peformance.
        • ElFitz5 hours ago
          > Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish

          One could think that. But VSCode is the one that occasionally failed to simply render text.

          No idea what happened these handful of times, but the UI was just completely screwed up, as if it were one of these "scratch to reveal" games, but with the file’s content (and unresponsive, obviously).

        • sieve3 hours ago
          I tried VSCode some years ago (immediately moved to Codium) and yes, it is extremely well-done for what it is. But Zed is good enough for me. Everything I care about for Python, TS/JS/CSS and C programming is available. I do not even miss the JetBrains tooling for these.
        • TeriyakiBomb4 hours ago
          I'm rooting for Zed but it does feel quite underbaked still right now.
      • throwaway917235 hours ago
        [dead]