By Thomas Claburn
Publication Date: 2026-05-04 21:13:00
Imagine working your butt off on a project, only to have VS Code put an attribution into your commit that says Copilot helped you, even if it did not. Microsoft has reversed a change that added a default AI attribution notice after user complaints that the bot was claiming credit for human-authored code.
The initial change – a pull request – altered VS Code’s Git extension to add “Co-authored-by: Copilot” to commits that involved some level of AI assistance. This was done in VS Code 1.110 in early March. The settings change was intended to “[add] the trailer for all AI-generated code, including inline completions.”
But developers said the AI authorship line got added even when not using Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant and when chat features had been disabled. And many expressed dissatisfaction with Microsoft activating the AI notice by default.
“The most concerning part is that I had already checked the…
