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...
  • calliope@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    31·
    2 days ago

    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:

    ringoz commented 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.

    • Maestro@fedia.io
      25·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • tomalley8342@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      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.

      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