VS Code shipped 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' on every commit by default. Microsoft is reverting it.

A two-line VS Code change shipped on April 16 and quietly turned every saved commit into a co-authored one. Pull request #310226 flipped the git.addAICoAuthor setting from off to all, so the editor began appending Co-Authored-by: Copilot <[email protected]> to commit messages whether or not Copilot had touched the diff.

The change went unnoticed until April 30, when Hacker News found it and pushed the thread to 1,499 points and 840 comments. The PR’s own discussion, currently sitting at hundreds of comments, ranges from “please revert” to “what the fuck is wrong with you.”

What the change actually did

The diff is two lines. One flips the contributed configuration default in extensions/git/package.json. The other flips the runtime fallback in extensions/git/src/repository.ts to match. Both move from off to all. With all, the git extension appends a Co-Authored-by trailer on every commit it builds. There is no carve-out for commits the user typed in full, no check for whether Copilot is enabled in the workspace, and no UI prompt the first time the trailer goes out.

The behavior compounded a separate bug. Multiple users reported in the PR thread that they had chat.disableAIFeatures set to true and still got the Copilot trailer on commits where they had never invoked the assistant. One user, ringoz, wrote: “I am not using copilot, I have ‘chat.disableAIFeatures’ and co-authored by copilot still gets inserted into commits.” That gap meant the trailer stamped commits in repos where the team had explicitly opted out of AI features.

How the dev community responded

The HN thread was where the story broke wide. The top reply, from a Microsoft employee, conceded the change shouldn’t have shipped this way and pointed at the upcoming revert. Comments below filled with accusations of inflated Copilot usage metrics, unflattering comparisons to Cursor’s commit-attribution model (which doesn’t auto-stamp), and a wave of users announcing migrations to Zed, which had just shipped 1.0 with a single global “disable all AI features” toggle.

Inside the PR itself, the tone was uglier. Project contributor whitequark posted: “Quick question: what the fuck is wrong with you?” Several long-time VS Code users wrote that they had spent the morning rewriting commit history with git rebase to strip the Copilot trailer from work they had typed by hand. The framing that picked up traction in the thread was that Microsoft was effectively claiming co-authorship of commits the user wrote alone.

What Microsoft is doing about it

Author cwebster-99 (a Microsoft engineer) closed the comment thread by saying the PR was meant to roll out a feature customers had been asking for and the broader rollout would be paused. Engineer dmitrivMS, who owns the Copilot integration, apologized in the PR thread:

“Thank you all for your feedback, professional or otherwise. Sorry about the regression. I will work on fixing this in 1.119. There is a number of issues with the Co-Author functionality: It should never have been enabled when disableAIFeatures is on. It should not add attribution to changes that were not done by AI. We need to make sure it receives a more test coverage before change the default.”

VS Code 1.119 is the upcoming monthly release. The fix flips the default back to off and also gates the trailer on actual Copilot usage rather than the editor having merely been open. Until 1.119 ships, the manual fix is one line in your settings JSON: "git.addAICoAuthor": "off".

What this means for you

Audit your last two weeks of commits if you use VS Code on a recent insider or stable build. Anything stamped Co-Authored-by: Copilot that you typed yourself can be cleaned up with git rebase -i and a trailer strip. If those commits are already pushed, decide whether the rewrite is worth the force-push pain; for most personal repos, leaving the trailer in place and noting the misattribution in your branch description is the lighter touch.

Set git.addAICoAuthor to off in your user settings now even if you intend to leave the default alone after 1.119 ships, so the next default flip doesn’t catch you. If your team uses Copilot intentionally and wants the trailer back on, do it at the workspace level so the choice is in the repo, not in the editor.

The bigger question the thread surfaced is the one Microsoft will dodge as long as it can. Copilot’s recent multiplier-hike and the prior switch to usage-based billing make per-commit attribution a metric that ties straight back to revenue. A Co-Authored-by trailer on a commit you wrote yourself is data Microsoft would rather have than not have. The 1.119 fix solves the regression. It doesn’t address the question of whether the default would have stayed flipped if Hacker News had stayed quiet.