Typical Microsoft! Turns Out VS Code Was Adding Copilot as a Git Co-Author Without Telling Anyone

VS Code has been quietly appending a Co-authored-by: Copilot line to users' git commits, including ones written entirely without Copilot's involvement.

The culprit behind this, git.addAICoAuthor, is a feature that was introduced in VS Code 1.110 back in March. It is designed to tag commits with a Copilot co-author trailer when AI-generated code is involved, and it launched with off as the default.

So far good, right? 🙂

That changed in April, when Courtney Webster, a Product Manager at Microsoft, submitted a pull request that changed one thing, the default value of git.addAICoAuthor from off to all.

The PR was reviewed and merged by VS Code team member Dmitriy Vasyura on April 16, without a release note or any kind of user-facing notification.

The all setting is the broadest option available for git.addAICoAuthor, which added the Copilot trailer to every commit involving any AI interaction, including inline completions.

With the default flipped to all, anyone who had not manually configured the setting was suddenly getting Copilot credited in their git history.

Things got messier from there. Developers reported that the credit info (trailer) was appearing even with chat.disableAIFeatures set to true. The trailer is also appended after the commit finalizes, not appearing in VS Code's commit message editor beforehand, so there was no window to catch and remove it before it showed up in git history.

One developer replaced Copilot's generated commit message with one they wrote themselves, committed, and still found the Copilot co-author line sitting in their log.

But fret not, as the fix has been delivered.

The Fix

Dmitriy, the VS Code team member who merged the original PR, came forward on Hacker News over the weekend under the username dmitriv, specifically to address the fallout.

Identifying himself as the person who approved the change, Dmitriy said that he was sorry for mistakenly turning on this feature by default without sufficient scrutiny.

Also clarifying the following before the conspiracy theories started emerging:

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.

The fix, now live on VS Code's GitHub repo as PR #313931, reverts git.addAICoAuthor back to off by default and corrects the detection issue that caused the trailer to appear even when Copilot was not in use.

You can expect this change to land with the upcoming VS Code 1.119 release.

Via: The Register