commit 85cd835e5923cddc1882e74354eac8dba6a925c1 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: John
AuthorDate: Fri May 22 13:25:33 2026 -0000
Merged PR #197
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The answer is absolutely not - the developer is responsible whether the code was AI assisted or not, and the dev's name should be attached to it just like any change.
The OP is right: these are ads, plain and simple, and it's a dark pattern for these companies to have attribution enabled by default
I don't know why you wouldn't want to track this information.
You have to let people know where your ideas are supported, or even come from.
To do anything else is plagiarism.
AI isn't a co-contributer - but it should be referenced - just like a link to a Stack Overflow comment when that's the source of code.
Having AI referenced in the commit is (IMO) best practice - but only co-contributer attributes are available (for now)
Right now you could run Laravel new app (replace with any new framework) and Claude/Cursor/Codex git commit will claim to of created the code.
But of course, owning an iPhone early on was seen as prestigious. Using an LLM is... not? Many people really don't want the world to know. For blogs in particular, the urge to have an LLM generate the entire thing and then post it under your name seems to be really difficult to resist.
This is the second or third HN post I'm seeing this month along the lines of "how dare AI companies flag my code as AI-generated". I just don't remember similar complaints about the iPhone footer. Not many HNers complain about The North Face putting the text "The North Face" on their hoodies either. Or Honda putting their logo on the car.
The reasons for this difference are interesting. The fact that companies put their logos / brands on stuff is a lot less interesting to me. You can call it bad, but again, why is this instance worse?
“Co-authored by Copilot” gives a multi billion dollar corp free advertising. I don’t care about them. I do care about Joe though.
Case in point, I have no way to know if dylan604 is even a real human at this point.
How could it possibly be product placement? It's got electrolytes!
There's also the named authors not taking credit for something they didn't fully do, regardless of whether the credit goes to someone else.
There's also traceability, if the authors/provenance needs to be considered because of some kind of problem or potential problem -- technical, legal, security, or otherwise.
Advertising in git commits is not ever going to substantially discredit these people or hold them accountable.
The fact that it's just a tool is irrelevant. You don't need to mention search and replace because everyone already knows that exists... mind you I have had commit messages which included sed commandlines, for ease of future reuse.
(The first sentence isn't a joke.)
What's the problem with the approach?
It is slightly weird that people accepted this new trend just like that, probably because they think this is being transparent and wanting to give attribution, but it'd be more useful like what the Linux kernel "AI Coding Assistants" page describes, something like `AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2]`, at least we get to know which model was used and/if any additional tooling on top. And `Assisted-by:` is more appropriate for that purpose than `Co-authored-by`.
- https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
Would you consider the .psd and .indd file extensions to be advertising? It's important to know what program the file came from so you can open it again, because MS Paint and Photoshop produce different files. Similarly, it's important to know whether and which LLM was used, because while all IDEs find and replace the same, each LLM generates code differently from each other and from humans.
I personally disagree and think commit messages makes the most sense. But I also think it's up to the personal preference of whoever owns the repository.
some people certainly do, to the extent of not caring at all about the outcome, only being concerned with the fact that the process was 'tainted' by ai.
the fervor for/against ai can approach the level of religion for some people.
AI can be a phenomenal tool for development when used correctly...
... But there is also now a trend on GitHub of low to no-skill individuals going around spamming garbage work in order to play the numbers game for their resume. When asked why they did something or to change it, they just act as a middleman for the robot and show no understanding or initiative.
So I can understand how it's become a turnoff for some people. I used to think it was a dumb rule until a project I work on started being spammed with said junk PRs
It's one thing if you're using AI to create code in a corporate context. Not my issue when some GPL code gets AI-laundered into production code and it eventually crops up. That's for legal, the C level and whatever AI provider's indemnification to sort out. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
But for personal projects? Ain't no way AI touches that stuff, ever. I simply don't want to deal with even the potential risk of getting expensive nastygrams from lawyers.
Right. You can indeed verify that a given computer program can reliably copy or sort data.
>You can't verify that a coding agent can reliably produce code
That's not the goal. You don't need to verify that a coding agent can reliably produce "code". You only need to verify that the solution produced by the agent solves a given problem. And that's already been done and verified many, many times. I hear most code is written by LLMs nowadays, and not all of their users are idiots.
Ugh
The problem is, someone has to review it (lest you end up like Amazon, offing parts of AWS and once the main storefront due to vibeslop ending up in production).
And I personally hate reviewing AI code with a passion. With a junior, easy, I can guide and teach them - and hopefully next time, they'll have improved. That's what I'm there for. But with AI? No matter if it's me using an AI or reviewing an MR created with AI assistance by a colleague - I can be pretty sure that next round I'll get exactly the same issues again because, by definition, AI agents are inference, not training, and thus incapable of improving unless the overlords want it to.
On top of that, if not very carefully guided, AI tends to create the ultimate sloppypasta - thousands of lines of code in a single file, completely impossible even for an ADHD brain to understand what is going on. But when you go and write an AGENTS.md or carefully engineer prompts... at that level of effort, you could just do it yourself.
If someone remembers what it was actually, that would really bring back memories
I use the ai as a tool, it helps me as an adhd autistic person to get things done. I still care about quality as much as before!!!
I’m so tired of bad actors fucking things up for the rest of us who do things right.
If Git commits formally had a co-authored header, it would go there. As it stands, there is one author and one committer. If something was pair programmed, whether with a human or machine, you need a commit message trailer if you want to show that. Commit message trailers are a formal mechanism in git, supported by tooling; there are git commands to add and remove them.
Totally agree about "sent from my fartphone", of course.
Disclosing things in the pull request is not enough; pull requests get lost in the sands of time. Years down the road, all that some downstream consumer has is the git history, not any CI-related metadata.
This is getting weird.
> Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
> "Assisted by blabot", "co-authored-by: slopgpt", "sent from my fartphone"
Yolo-Slopped-By: Sonnet-4.5 <claude@anthropic.com>
Claude Code and Codex get it for free, though, because I don't mind disclosing my AI usage.
This comment brought to you by “Jessica, come back from your mom’s, I didn’t mean what I said!” - Scott in Oklahoma.
Author: Some AI model, Committer: You Friendly Dev
Author and Committer: Your Friendly Dev
The laws will likely change in the US thanks to lobby, and maybe even change in Europe, too, where they may compromise about it to "not be left behind" and will present them under "Digital Sovereignty" umbrella.
Overall, this "Co-Authored" bit is yet another Trojan horse.
https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-...
I think this is very poor advice. Knowing who/what changed the code is often crucial for understanding why it changed.
Saves CPU cycles I guess.
co-authorship implies ability to hold author rights, which afaik an algorithm can't do.
are folks adding speakeasy/stainless co-authorship lines to their commits? should i add alembic as a co-author after making some changes to the database schema?
Co-authored-by: buf generate <noreply@github.com>this does not seem to match reality, see:
1. count for claude as co-author: 25M
2. count for speakeasy as co-author: 917
3. count for stainless as co-author: 6.2k
4. count for alembic as co-author: *Your search did not match any commits*
assume no deep learning, of any kind is involved: you write a program, you are the author, right? you compile the code, are you still the author? do you have to attribute co-authorship to gcc/llvm/oracle?
i think not, you are still the author, same as when anyone else uses an llm to write code.
ianal
I agree. It's both an ad and a useful signal of where the code came from or how it was created.
Just like the default iPhone email signature, it's an ad and a hint that the author was typing with their thumbs, so it's probably a brief auto-corrected message for that reason.
Which for my repositories means I want ~95% less of it in my commit history. I'm prepared to round up for simplicity. But to each their own.
[1] https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
[2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d18b8f3238abdb2cd878...
Personally, I prefer Assisted-By. Co-Authored-By implies a level of respect and self-direction I don't think LLM's deserve.
So annoying. Just stop, Anthropic, please. And pay attention to the request to stop, instead of silently turning it back on again all the time.
Latest thing was linking to the Claude session that generated some of the PR. Put in somewhere that a commit had LLM assistance, fine, but don't spam everybody please, ESPECIALLY in all the icons all over the GitHub interface. Sheesh.
It's already obvious that it's coming from an LLM because it's been overdocumented with excessive prose, and the code is overly verbose.
Last time I checked nobody was adding anything to my commits. Did I miss something?
A month ago Copilot was inserting itself as coauthor in commits made from VS Code if any inline suggestion had been used.
Why would you let AI commit into your repo under your name, that's a separate question.
It's very useful if it says AI/LLM was used, then I know that there may not actually be a reason for the choice in the commit, so per Chesterton's fence I can then tear down that fence.
Now, do I need to know which brand of LLM? No. And fair enough, I'll stop being specific.
they know things like your git author line, your github handle, and the exact codebase you were working on
the general shape of commits
even if you change extensively, they will probably be able to match this with claude code sessions
sure the atribution at the end of commits is a signal, but I doubt it's much valuable
if anything it's more valuable to anthropic competitors, that don't have claude code session data to match to open source contributors, and will have to guess if any given code is AI generated, and by how much
99% of people don't edit the commits by hand, they review and then tell Claude how to edit the commits (or leave a PR comment it reads), that's far easier to ingest than the tiny exhaust of manual edits.
Also, if I publish something online, you don't get to tell me what I can and can't put there (except for reasonable exemptions for hate speech and such, of course). If you don't like repos that tag their slop, go read someone else's code. Feel free to write a filter in your adblocker for the dozen AI tools you usually find.