There ought to be decent number of people within Microsoft who have "Copilot usage" as a KPI. I don't think this was gamesmanship on their part (no sarcasm, I truly do not suspect malice), but I'm sure if it could have slipped in without backlash, they would have enjoyed seeing their line go up.
I'm not sure that anyone wants the scarlet letter of an AI coauthor on their code just because they used something simple like next edit suggestions or AI autocomplete. It seems like the "all" setting basically only exists for people that haven't figured out how to change it to something else yet.
(Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)
It's only one sliver of the problem here, but -- do you know how often I update my code editor? Like once every five or ten years, to the version that was released a year or two ago.
I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.
Are they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.
Seems pretty clear, Claude and Codex were getting a lot of free publicity by instructing their models to do the same and MS wanted similar results. However, a bug caused this to be applied to all commits instead of all Copilot-influenced commits.
It's not even default to ON, it's default to ALL (or at least to a lot), even non co-pilot commits, that's what made people made. If it was at least correct maybe it would have gone unnoticed.
I recall there was some understanding that it had a legitimate use as well as the obvious marketing, which was to advise the reader that the message may be unexpectedly concise or contain errors because it was sent from a cell phone, something less common before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry phones did this too for the same reasons.
You misunderstand the purpose of "Sent from my iPhone" - it was a status symbol, it showed that the sender was part of the superior iPhone owning elite. It was trivial to remove, but most didnt "oh, I am too busy too remove it, I guess I'll just leave it and let everybody know I can afford an iPhone".
You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.
Honestly extremely pathetic by a trillion dollar corporation that has a massive, undemocratic, say in how technology is developed in this country.
Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.
Yeah break up all the big companies so Chinese state sponsored behemoths can take over everything. This isn’t the 90s where Americans only competed with other Americans.
2 days ago:
> We did catch it internally in testing [1]
Today:
> There was a bug in the code that was not found in testing
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193
The bug is not about code behavior, but getting noticed by users :)
All the people there asking the simple question of why it got changed and getting ignored.
There ought to be decent number of people within Microsoft who have "Copilot usage" as a KPI. I don't think this was gamesmanship on their part (no sarcasm, I truly do not suspect malice), but I'm sure if it could have slipped in without backlash, they would have enjoyed seeing their line go up.
We all know the answer anyway.
> There was a bug in the code that was not found in testing that attributed non-Copilot code completions to Copilot.
The bug is not about code behavior, but getting noticed by users :)
I'm not sure that anyone wants the scarlet letter of an AI coauthor on their code just because they used something simple like next edit suggestions or AI autocomplete. It seems like the "all" setting basically only exists for people that haven't figured out how to change it to something else yet.
(Funnily enough, I always commit through the command line in VS code anyways...not sure why. But I guess I would have avoided this annoyance, so that's a plus!)
I am using a different approach.
`user.email` is always my email.
`user.name` is either my account name, or model name like `gpt-5.5-high`.
I can easily filter & blame which line was written by me or some specific AI
It's only one sliver of the problem here, but -- do you know how often I update my code editor? Like once every five or ten years, to the version that was released a year or two ago.
I do my own commits by hand so it's moot anyway, but there's a fair bit of "leopards ate my face" going in the GitHub thread.
Are they apologizing? Was it a bug? Why did they make this decision and what's the end goal? It's so unclear from the message - as evidenced by a lot of the responses.
Seems pretty clear, Claude and Codex were getting a lot of free publicity by instructing their models to do the same and MS wanted similar results. However, a bug caused this to be applied to all commits instead of all Copilot-influenced commits.
They did say it's a bug that they even caught during testing yet somehow let go through. Author of the issue mentioned this on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193
Default to ON is a complete dik move
It's not even default to ON, it's default to ALL (or at least to a lot), even non co-pilot commits, that's what made people made. If it was at least correct maybe it would have gone unnoticed.
Inserting authorship claims is incredibly tacky. It’s today’s “Intel Inside” sticker. I don’t want your stickers on the computer I bought.
“Sent from my iPhone” isn’t an authorship claim.
Sent from my iPhone is worse than intel inside or claude in the commits in my opinion.
There is something so gross about injecting an advertising message into every single communication a user has on their device.
I recall there was some understanding that it had a legitimate use as well as the obvious marketing, which was to advise the reader that the message may be unexpectedly concise or contain errors because it was sent from a cell phone, something less common before the iPhone came out. BlackBerry phones did this too for the same reasons.
You misunderstand the purpose of "Sent from my iPhone" - it was a status symbol, it showed that the sender was part of the superior iPhone owning elite. It was trivial to remove, but most didnt "oh, I am too busy too remove it, I guess I'll just leave it and let everybody know I can afford an iPhone".
You are right, it was advertising, but it advertized the user, not Apple.
At least “Sent from my iPhone” was a factual claim, unlike this mess.
On the flip side there are people who believe that LLM-assisted coding changes require attribution in git history.
It's definitely helpful to know whether a PR was AI-assisted or not and the git attribution line is a simple and effective way of communicating that.
I also recommend specifying model name and version so the maintainer knows upfront the level of slop they are dealing with.
What’s the problem with intel inside? That’s perfectly normal.
What’s the problem with intel inside? That’s perfectly normal.
I don't want my computer to look like it's racing in NASCAR.
Honestly extremely pathetic by a trillion dollar corporation that has a massive, undemocratic, say in how technology is developed in this country.
Microsoft should be broken up into a dozen different companies and it's quite clear they violated their consent decree from the US DOJ a few decades later, so they should get punished extra hard. Maybe nationalize Excel putting it in the public domain for starters.
Yeah break up all the big companies so Chinese state sponsored behemoths can take over everything. This isn’t the 90s where Americans only competed with other Americans.
GP didn’t say all the big tech companies. Just Microslop.
Honestly not sure I find that prospect worse than the American status quo. At least the Chinese regime is a rational actor.
So you're saying the market is weaker with more competition?
Nope, just break up the one that has been consistently found to be abusing their market position. Microsoft has been embroiled in this since the 90s.