Not content with threatening to replace your role at work or causing company layoffs, AI is taking credit for work it did not even generate. Or at least it was until Microsoft Copilot got called out.
Until recently, VS Code had been adding "Co-authored by: Copilot" to Git commits, even if Copilot had not helped at all. The behavior was caused when a pull request altered a Git extension to add the text by default.
The feature in question is meant to note when Copilot is used to create AI-generated code. It was off by default in March but swapped from off to all on April 16.
The change resulted in Copilot being added as a co-author when AI was involved in any way, even when AI had not generated code.
Even if a user had set chat.disableAIFeatures to true, the credit to Copilot was added.
Dmitriy Vasyura, the reviewer who approved that pull request, shared an apology on Hacker News:
"I am the person who approved this PR and would like to acknowledge and apologize for the mistake of turning this feature on by default without sufficient upfront validation," said Vasyura.
They clarified that the move was not made maliciously:
"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."
Based on the email address shared and their GitHub page, Vasyura works with or for Microsoft.
The feature is now set to off by default once again.
Despite Vasyura's assurance of no ill intent, many were upset by the change. Copilot being credited incorrectly could cause issues for developers.
User "PufPufPuf2" explained the risks of the change (emphasis added):
"My issue with this: if my intention is to never have these "co authored by " trailers in my commits, this is a sudden breaking change. What's worse, it is not immediately visible to the user. Now I could look like I use a not-company-approved AI. That's absolutely unacceptable, this could cost people their jobs."
In one comment, Vasyura clarified that the pull request was reverted due to a bug in the feature, not massive backlash over the change. A separate comment by Vasyura confirmed that the bug was caught in testing but shipped anyway.
Vasyura detailed the situation in a GitHub post. Comments replying to that post are critical.
"Automatically enabling this was bad. Then claiming it was to “fix a bug” is utterly ridiculous," said martinbean.
"We’ve seen Microsoft shoehorning Copilot into literally everything it can, so when automatically adding “Co-authored by Copilot” to commits from inside a Microsoft code editor is claimed to be an “accident”, you can understand how people just aren’t going to believe that. At all."
Earlier this year, Microsoft was accused of injecting ads into GitHub pull requests. Microsoft disagreed with the definition of an ad, referring to an insertion as a "coding agent tip."
User trust in Microsoft tools is eroding. GitHub outages have spiked since Microsoft acquired the platform and well-known developers are moving on to other tools.
This VS Code issue will likely hurt Microsoft's reputation further.
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