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.

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...

My issue with this: if my intention is to never have these "co authored by <tool>" trailers in my commits, this is a sudden breaking change. What's worse, it is not immediately visible to the user. Now I could look like I use a not-company-approved AI. That's absolutely unacceptable, this could cost people their jobs. The "bug" (or "metrics boosting feature", as PMs call it?) that it claims all commits including ones never touched by Copilot are just icing on cake.

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

Don't you understand that the default shouldn't be changed at all in this case? It improves nothing and affects every single user. If an org/project wants this behavior then it can enforce this flag for its contributions. The only valid reason for this change is someone's performance somewhere in Microsoft is dependent on VS Copilot usage metric.

Interesting case:

- a project manager vibe-coded the change without thinking it through at all

- the PR was reviewed by an LLM

- an actual engineer gave LGTM without really reviewing the changes, trusting the LLM

Did I get this right?

Why does the commit editor hide the coauthored message? Why not pre-populate the text field and users take or leave it when committing?

I just wanted to say, while I think this feature was a bad idea, I sincerely applaud your willingness to post here, knowing you'll get roasted. Seriously brave and commendable.

Why are you taking the fall and not the PM who authored the change (and submitted a PR with an uninformative title and no comment) and, I'm assuming, plays a role in managing the project?

Just for any future mea culpa, I'd recommend not hedging with comments like this one:

> As folks mentioned here - many similar tools do this as well.

It's really doubtful they have the same behavior people are complaining about here: namely including the authored by Copilot statement when it wasn't used (or even enabled).

What is the use-case where you expect users would be happy that you modify their commit messages with MS marketing? Do you think it would be ok to edit every commit to append “written with VS Code”?

> I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions

Here's one:

I think a senior sysadmin needs to sit you down in their office and have a very serious talk with you about the responsibility that comes with writing code other people run. I am serious. We used to have these talks with everyone who got sudo access. You shouldn't be shipping code if you don't understand the trust that is required of people in your position.

This isn't just about this "feature" being active when AI features are disabled, the way you mis-implemented this has resulted in it modifying the commit message with the user even seeing it! That is malicious behavior, not an innocent little feature "to make life easier".

I've fully switched off of VS Code to Kate now, which is faster and better behaved in most cases anyway. Bye.

thank you for doing this, it gave me the push I needed to finally switch to zed. vscode has really been going downhill for a while now. it's sad to watch, it used to be a really nice editor

> There was no ill intent

Only callous disregard for your users

> many similar tools do this as well

But since we have normalised that, it’s okay?

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation

I simply do not believe you

> a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code

Literally who?

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.

Under which circumstances can you ever approve something like this?

This goes beyond incompetence. Either you do not understand what important information a commit holds or what seems way more plausible to me is that Microsoft simply decided to try this out and see how people would react.

> There was no ill intent by evil corporation...

I will ever in my life buy that from Microsoft.

One of my customers actually requires attribution to agents if they're used, not only for tracking purposes but also for understanding potential vectors for slopcode. It's been useful and occasionally enforced. That being said, implementation without due consideration and warning should be frowned upon.

Considering the size (and significance) of the VSCode user base, it feels like someone should be in charge of ensuring that default behavior doesn't change without good reason.

Does anyone (or any team) have ownership of the extensions/git/package.json file?

> 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.

Can you expand on this? Who "expects" their code editor to lie about using Copilot?

> 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.

Then make it an extension, not a IDE-behaviour thing. Is that so complicated, so difficult?

> a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code w.r.t. AI-generated code

This isn't enough. What was the _full train of thought_ for this? Why would it be added when AI isn't used?

> 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 its creation?

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.

I appreciate your willingness to come and try and salvage this situation. What I don't understand is why are you the one doing this here and on GH, during the weekend, and not the PM who created the original PR? Surely they have some input.

And another thing is, why was there absolutely no pushback from your part on any of the issues with the original PR, and why it was merged within hours in that state?

Changing a global default this way is hugely disrespectful to users.

As a result I’ll be uninstalling vscode from all my machines, I’m tired of disabling things in vscode I didn’t ask for especially in regards to AI.

There are open source tools that clearly respect users more and have a track record of not doing these kinds of stupid things.

Be better.

Respectfully -

You are working for one of the largest companies on the planet. You push code that gets used by millions of people.

How on earth are you not thoroughly testing your changes??? How can something like this slip into a real build? Like, this is egregious.

I work somewhere that makes software for a lot of users (although not as many as Microsoft!). We also need to ship quickly. But we work on a 45-day cycle, with 15 of those days being dedicated to ensuring we didn't add any awful bugs (and fixing them ASAP before it goes to users - or reverting the change until it is ready).

I would expect Microsoft to have AT LEAST that amount of care. We can't trust that you are shipping software that even works anymore!

What other changes are going in that are broken in more subtle ways? It used to be that VS Code was rock solid, and any issues were likely third-party extensions - but now it's a crapshoot, and I can't be sure if crashes etc. are the fault of extensions or Microsoft themselves!

The VS Code team needs to use this mistake as motivation to lead the charge on making a quality editor. Not an editor that gets half-baked, untested changes pushed weekly. An editor that is dogfooded and where a mistake like this going to prod is unacceptable.

Because if you don't, people won't trust your editor anymore. Just like people have stopped trusting your OS, and now users are fleeing it in such numbers that the Windows team has recognized they have a problem and are changing course.

That WILL happen to VS Code and GitHub soon unless you actually start owning mistakes internally and fixing them before users find them.

Have it as an add-on said customers can add. Opt-in, not opt-out. No AI without consent.

Whether or not the intent is good, the optics are extremely bad.

I assume you are keenly aware that Windows, Office, and by extension, all of MS's customer facing products are not exactly regarded particularly well. Windows 11 specifically is a laughing stock today, even among folks who don't necessarily know computers, and a lot of that resentment is driven by 2 things:

• Pushing AI everywhere when no one asked for it. • Not reading the room and adding junk features that no one wants.

This change is both of those, again, wrapped up in another package. The timing of this is extremely bad for VS Code as a project as it looks an awful lot like, 'Microsoft is just shoving my AI junk into my stuff and failing to work on the features we actually want'.

I'm not taking a side on this either way as I will jam a fork into my eye before I use VS Code over VS proper and have no stake in this, but I'm just saying that the powers that be that are approving these kinds of changes are ~continuing~ to fail to read the room.

I'll add as someone who may be forced to consider VS Code in the future (Depending on if Windows unfucks itself before something critical breaks for me on W10), I would read something like that and I think rightly assume bad intent. I know VS Code and VS and Office and Windows are not the same team, but again, MS as a whole has a very serious optics problems and my read of this on the surface level is: "Oh, they tried to sneak in more AI junk, and when called out on it, they pushed it to the back, probably to make it a default again in some future update that they can hide it in". It just looks very, very bad at a time when no MS products have negative social capital to spend on this kind of stuff.

- A qualified sorry for one particular aspect of this

- It wasn't our intention

- Our users asked for it [you'll have to take our word for it]

- Everyone else is doing it anyway

- Statement that I am reasonable and will be co-operative with the community but with conditions

That's a bingo!

At a hackathon for my school recently a MS employee was a judge.

ALL he wanted to tell me was that I should give VSCode another shot: "It's good now".

You can't blame the dog, only the environment surrounding the dog.

I feel like many replies are missing that this is satire

> 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.

Please elaborate on what "similar tools" claim that commits are co-authored by AI when the AI features are all turned off. You're trying to defend the theoretically correct version of this that you didn't make, not the actual version you did make.

> I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions

It's hard to take this seriously; you know exactly what you did wrong here and what you should have done instead. Testing that this doesn't happen when Copilot was not used is extremely trivial; if you're not lying about it being unintentional, the fact that it didn't occur to anyone to do it still says more than enough about what the priorities are here. At absolute best, the priorities of you and your team are so fundamentally wrong that it's impossible to trust any of you going forward.

I rarely comment on HN threads, but in this case big respect for coming out and owning the mistake, keep that shit up.

If more people from MS had the guts to actually talk to their users, I'd probably have a lot less to complain about at work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hopefully there's some good lessons to improve the process, not just feedback for this single incident.

Thank you for your honesty, this is pretty brave.

On the other hand...this feels like a situation where possibly you should not have said anything at all? The fact that you're on HN responding feels ill-advised to me.

So far this is what I've gleaned:

- Microsoft has PMs vibe coding against VSCode (by itself not necessarily a big deal)

- Microsoft PMs can vibe code against VSCode and get stuff shipped to production with only a single approval

That second one is a huge deal in my book. What I've learned now is that VSCode, a product with an enormous deployment base, is trivially compromised if the calls are coming from inside the house. Apparently all that has to happen for all users to be affected is a PM requesting you to "please approve my PR real quick, trying to get it in." And now there's a massive change in the wild, visible to many users.

Being familiar with big corp dynamics, this really worries me. This does feel like a not-well-thought-out mistake but I can easily imagine many other scenarios that would be far worse.

How can I trust VSCode going forward? How can I reassure my employer and fellow colleagues that it's safe to use? This is really a terrible look for Microsoft and very damaging to the reputation.

I feel bad for you the engineer and PM here because with the web being what it is, folks are casting blame onto you. That's missing the point since the issue is that MSFT even let this happen in the first place. Engineering processes need to be halted and re-evaluated basically yesterday. If something like this happens again it may not be possible to rebuild the trust at all.

I hate to say it but for myself this issue makes me strongly consider switching away from VSCode permanently, something I had not seriously considered before yesterday. Best of luck to everyone on the VSCode team.

First, revert the commit, then apologise.

Rule of thumb, such features should always be Opt-In

[flagged]

Nobody wants this shit. There is no timeline where developers want junk inserted into their commit messages.

Just disable everything AI by default bro.

Brave man. RIP your inbox.

You're an idiot.

But I'm an idiot every day too, so I can relate. We can only learn from these mistakes, keep it up!

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.

> 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.

The industry spent decades preaching us about power savings, with Microsoft settings application lecturing about power saves and the update app programming them on renewables peak, only for... wasting gigawatts by forcing us to have copilot everywhere.

If Microsoft were consistent, which isn't, power saving mode would disable AI features.

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.

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.

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

Mmm... I think I missed that part.

GMAIL in the web is so shitty, I literally switched over to another provider. I don't know how anyone can use them as their webmail client. You can't make sense of longer mail threads with forwards, answers etc. in between - it becomes an unreadable hot mess.

They invested billions. They're scared.

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.

When did this happen?

> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX.

I’m sure Google cares very much about UX as a funnel into their ad brokerage, but was there some time when they cared about it in the user’s interest?

Maybe that magical moment when the results page showed the results first?

> And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX

Are we talking about the same Google? They still haven't fixed Android gesture navigation after almost a decade.

What use is a reputation if you don’t spend it now and then? If this lets Microsoft cut some divisional headcounts by 95%, certainly their enterprise customers are onboard with naked greed and don’t care about how it looks either — and us individuals aren’t relevant to MS, so why would maintaining our good perception of them matter at all?

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.

The only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?

>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

That reminds me of a few years ago when Android phones replaced the behavior of "long press sleep/power button" from "shut down" to "ask AI about what's in your screen". Perhaps a manager got promoted somewhere for "raising AI usage" in Android phones.

Its even worse in my eyes, they dont even offer a model they themselves maintain.

Yeah, even .NET is now plagued with AI, see AI dashboard on Aspire, AI components on Blazor, .NET upgrade assistant now being AI agent,....

VSCode hasn't yet been rebranded into VS CoPilot by pure luck.

I don't think anyone at Microsoft truly understands how much they have ruined their reputation. This won't be fixed again by open-sourcing a few tools. Fool me once, etc.

I will fight against any Microsoft tooling being used at every company until I die. This is unforgivable.

The entire selling point is "you no longer have to conform to standards in input to get usable output"; why would they conform to standards in output, or in process?

> 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.

Not that surprising when you consider the monumental investments. It's heinous but right in line with modern corporate business ethics.

Claude code not supporting specifying an alternate location to look for agent skills is another example.

Sent from iPhone

This particular change feels... human driven.

Wait, when did they rehabilitate their reputation? Before AI they were already shoving crap down our throats through windows 11.

What do you mean, there are many, perhaps too many, AI standards. MCP, SKILLS.md, A2A, two different ACPs, ECA.

The pile of money they set on fire is still burning and they are desperate to get returns before it burns out

AI is the ultimate grifting tool, grifters gonna grift.

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation

Which literal 20+ year period was that?

> all that matters is "pls use our AI".

If you look at the staggering amounts of money that have been put into the tech, this attitude becomes practically mandatory, in an inhuman sense. They have to get ROI, at literally any cost. And it shows.

> 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.

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.

TRYING to rehabilitate. only fools fell for it

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.

> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX

Have we been using the same Google?

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation

I hated with a passion when people claimed "MS loves open source now". I feel vindicated.

If a corporation can do a 180° turn in one direction, it can do a 180° turn in the other direction just as fast. They did not understand that, either because they didn't want to or because they weren't smart enough to understand how incentives shape behavior.

The incentives or a corporation are roughly making money for "shareholders"[0], making money for the C suite, making money for managers.

[0]: = People who do none of the actual work but have enough money to use it to get more money which therefore goes to them instead of the people doing actual work. (Intentionally saying "get" instead of "make" because they don't "make" anything.)

That's pretty standard review practice in there by now.

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?)

Constructive feedback: revert it and then apologise instead of just doing half of it.

There are two commits in the PR, the second of the two seems to update the fallback config to avoid the inconsistency that Copilot was complaining about.

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.

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.

It is designed to undermine any future disputes regarding IP and their "AI" being trained on our mind products.

I think it's kinda cute that you don't see it as an attempt to steal code by claiming they "co-authored" it. How long before they claim they can use any code co-authored by Copilot in training? How long before you see your own code, "co-authored by Copilot" as an output in a commercial product that YOU aren't making a profit from? Just a thought :)

That makes the bite less damaging - if everyone hax "Co-authored-by AI" in their commits less shame for it, just a normal fact of life now, not a sign of low quality.

I've never heard of git commits being used in a legal case, do you have any examples?

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.

One could argue that Co-Authored by Copilot means 'not under copyright'

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.

This should be higher, as this dates from 5 days ago I wonder why OP didn't bother to mention this follow-up

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

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".

However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.

Microsoft already does this with their mobile Outlook. Sent by Outlook Android / iOS on the bottom of the message.

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.

But you can see it and remove it before sending. It’s definitely not the same.

Does anybody else remember Tapatalk? They did the same with signatures in forums.

"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."

Sorry about that, it's being reverted: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931

short commit messages, but you would usually allow details in the details part of the commit message, right? Which is where this goes?

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.

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

Isn't it also cause they want to tag those commit so that they don't feed it into copilot training?

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

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.

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.

Next Microsoft will sue you to get a share of revenues and ownership as co-author, if your product ever makes success.

But only if you watched this 1 min Segment of today's sponsor...

Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer

This will be so true hahaha

More like Carl's Jr.: Fuck you! We're eating.

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?

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.

Many such cases.

This was merged by a Principal SWE though. Maybe overruled by leadership :)

640k … there is something poetic about that number.

Can you explain how this works? Doesn’t this also stop you from connecting to it over ssh via vs code?

its a sad truth, but in the end, for companies, software is just a means to an end: more revenue

and if they can get more revenue by less quality and cutting corners they will do it; see countless examples of such scandals in many industries...

To be precise,

"git.addAICoAuthor": "off"

Until they change it to „CoauthorAI” in next version. This shouldn’t be a default in the first place

The change was about helping teams ensure AI-generated code is attributed in commits - nothing to do with copyrights and the like. If you don't have to take my word for it - query VS Code repo for changes and issues that went into implementing this and you will see.

Most odd things can be explained by imagining who might be able to buy a new boat as a result.

I have bad news for you about what current AI was trained on...

Should be the top comment for succintly summarizing the situation.

For me it just inserted "Copilot" and I was only using inline completion, not agents. A bit weird too since my VSCode doesn't even have copilot installed as an extension (I had just started using that editor again on an old linux install and was wondering why I was even getting AI completions).

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

Zed is looking pretty good right now

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.

> Man, I really feel like they want us to hate them

Man, I feel old.

The original commit is (publicly) preserved on Github.com until perpetuity, so I wouldn't use the term 'remove'.

Or people could instead not use Microslop software, easy fix for the AI bullshit. But yeah of course you're technically right.

It would be to starting giving a chance to other competitors. I have been very comfortable zed except for 2 issues (on Linux). After they are resolved, I will probably start using it 100% of the time.

That is the crux of the issue: the detection of whether the changes came from copilot or not is buggy, thus all changes are flagged as coming from copilot, thus the title is correct.

I mean, they chose to work for Microsoft.

It may be incompetent malice.

Agreed, fixed disableAiFeatures in my PR: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/313931 Will work on making it better later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

You may be surprised to learn some of the employed adults on this site were born after the 90’s.

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?

"You can't make people care."

Not until they've personally been hurt by something.

Unfortunately I can't recall who said this, it was the beginning of a tech talk and it made something instantly click for me.

We have almost no way to influence both politicians and corporations because an individual informed vote gets lost in the avalanche of votes by people who don't care. The biggest lie a few hundred years ago was that "all men are created equal" told to the general population by people who owned slaves. The biggest lie in our generation is that we have democracy.

1) It's impossible to vote for what you really want because the choice is restricted to predefined options - political parties are only a few points in a highly dimensional space representing what people actually want.

2) Everyone votes on everything and every vote has the same weight. It's impossible to target your vote to one issue you researched deeply - it'll be lost in the noise of people who are voting about something completely unrelated but their vote picks a party which in turn affects your issue.

3) Corporations, especially in tech, have just as much influence as the government and they're little dictatorships. Not even their workers can influence their decisions directly.

Ironically the one good thing we got from AI is being able to sift through everyone's entire internet history (even de-anonymizing the stuff they didn't want under their regular nicks) and being able to tell exactly who supported this.

Does this include GitHub?

It's really hard to find alternatives. Especially for VSCode.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I already added a pre-commit hook to strip this out. Having to defend myself from my own editor is absurd.

Please do share

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

Unfortunately zed is not a complete, finished product in the sense that VSCode is.

> 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.

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?

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?

I love a good dog-pile, but there is little constructive happening in that thread beyond variations of, "WTF?".

Reputational damage already done I think

The editor wars never ended, and VSCode has been user hostile since inception. It came with unavoidable telemetry right out the gate.

vim and emacs are both still great choices.

> 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.

No personal attacks please. They're just cogs in the machine.

The organization and process that enables it to get to this point is the problem. And that is MS, always has been.

Come on. At least one person at Microsoft is trying to own up to a mistake and fix it.

It's vibe coding all the way down.

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.

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.

Not sufficient. See the GitHub thread. It is tagging things even when AI features are disabled.

Make sure to delete VSCode fully from any PC I have access to and annoy all my coworkers to get rid of it.

Moved to Zed and recommended my team do the same.

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.

Turn it off and rage on social media.

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