A recent pull request effectively turned Copilot into a "co-author" for every programming project created in Visual Studio Code – even when the programmer behind the screen...
That’s not at all what the PR did. Or at least that wasn’t the intention.
This PR changes the Git extension’s git.addAICoAuthor setting so that AI co-author trailers are enabled by default, making the default behavior automatically add a Co-authored-by trailer when AI-generated code contributions are detected.
ringozcommented last week
I am not using copilot, I have “chat.disableAIFeatures” and co-authored by copilot still gets inserted into commits.
I also thought that this was interesting, from the above article:
Earlier this week, Vasyura shared an update on the “co-authored by Copilot” issue. The Microsoft engineer said the forced co-authorship resulted from a bug in the code that Redmond employees did not encounter in their testing environment. The default AI attribution was eventually disabled, but is now returning in a different – hopefully less disruptive – form.
That’s because even basic autocomplete is now built on top of Copilot. So, if you autocompleted anything, your entire change would be attributed to Copilot.
I also thought that the above quote “Redmond employees did not encounter in their testing environment.” was interesting, because just a couple of days ago the exact same Microsoft engineer said this about the exact same pull request:
Fair point. We did catch it internally in testing (as we use VS Code for all our work, so some folks did stumble on it), but I think we underestimated the impact and should do a better job at that.
That’s not at all what the PR did. Or at least that wasn’t the intention.
Yep, people were reporting that it was marking code they wrote by hand as “Coauthored by Copilot.”
There are some comments on the original pull request, such as:
I also thought that this was interesting, from the above article:
That’s because even basic autocomplete is now built on top of Copilot. So, if you autocompleted anything, your entire change would be attributed to Copilot.
I also thought that the above quote “Redmond employees did not encounter in their testing environment.” was interesting, because just a couple of days ago the exact same Microsoft engineer said this about the exact same pull request:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994193
I guess he must have changed his mind since then? lol
Underestimating the impact of pushing out known buggy update vibe coded by a PM to millions of users? lol