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Stop Advertising in Your Commits
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoI have to assume these aren’t just ads, but also a critical RLHF avenue for Anthropic. I imagine they scrape these commits from GitHub and compare them against what Claude provided to the user. If the diff that is pushed is different it means the human had to refine the LLM output and that can be fed back in as training data. Presumably semantic search could enable you to find the matching Claude Code session.
- bpodgursky 6mo agoI really doubt they bother. 99% of people don't edit the commits by hand, they review and then tell Claude how to edit the commits (or leave a PR comment it reads), that's far easier to ingest than the tiny exhaust of manual edits.
- teaearlgraycold 6mo agoLLM providers ask for RLHF feedback in terms of thumbs up/down in their Web UI. That's just one bit of information, given only at the user's whim. The hand-refined code is gold by comparison. They're already scraping all of GitHub. They have the technology and resources to semantic search. I would be shocked if they haven't at least tried.
- bpodgursky 6mo ago[dead]
- nextaccountic 6mo agothey already have enough data to make this correlation almost 100% accurate they know things like your git author line, your github handle, and the exact codebase you were working on the general shape of commits even if you change extensively, they will probably be able to match this with claude code sessions sure the atribution at the end of commits is a signal, but I doubt it's much valuable if anything it's more valuable to anthropic competitors, that don't have claude code session data to match to open source contributors, and will have to guess if any given code is AI generated, and by how much
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lifis 6mo agoHuh? It's not advertising, it's disclosure that the code was not fully (or at all) written by you.
- ellyagg 6mo agoIt’s both
- mbreese 6mo ago> Sent from my iPhone. I agree. It's both an ad and a useful signal of where the code came from or how it was created. Just like the default iPhone email signature, it's an ad and a hint that the author was typing with their thumbs, so it's probably a brief auto-corrected message for that reason.
- amarant 6mo agoThe iPhone analogy is very apt and accurate: it's ~95% advertising and ~5% useful signal. Which for my repositories means I want ~95% less of it in my commit history. I'm prepared to round up for simplicity. But to each their own.
- 0123456789ABCDE 6mo agoit absolutely is advertising, you can even call it a growth hack if you want to feel good about it co-authorship implies ability to hold author rights, which afaik an algorithm can't do. are folks adding speakeasy/stainless co-authorship lines to their commits? should i add alembic as a co-author after making some changes to the database schema? Co-authored-by: buf generate <noreply@github.com>
- cobbal 6mo agoIf co-authorship implies holding rights, then what gives the "primary author" who just prompted for the code the right to add their own name?
- aleda145 6mo agoI don't know, it is a useful signal that the person did not think deeply about their code changes, and should be treated as such.
- eastbound 6mo agoWorking alone, I often look at the Git Blame and wonder “Wait, did I write that or did AI write that?”
- Galanwe 6mo agoReminds me of 25 years ago, the default BitchX config on most distributions contained something that would crash the client with a message "I did not read the configuration". If someone remembers what it was actually, that would really bring back memories
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoI'm too lame to read BitchX.doc https://www.irchelp.org/clients/unix/bitchx.html https://www.irchelp.org/clients/unix/bitchx.html
- bergheim 6mo agoSame with eggdrop. Speaking of; why the names?
- conradludgate 6mo agoIt's a signal, and probably a high success signal in open source slop discovery, but it's more of a correlation than a causation. I've seen lots of changes that bear the co-authored tag that have had a lot of thought behind the code changes.
- bluGill 6mo agoYou are responsible, it doesn't matter if a LLM wrote it. Sometimes someone will touch my code and I got wish git blame still had my name. (That is they fixed the spelling of some variables - I'm a bad speller but know the codes are better)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ishan0102 6mo agoI much prefer this over the alternative where people use AI to code without anyone knowing.
- deepsun 6mo agoNo, the post doesn't say about hiding that, you can write "created by AI" or "helped by LLM". The post is about advertising for commercial products.
- mbreese 6mo agoTheir rant was about any and all AI notices in commits. They specifically state that merge requests is where that belongs. I personally disagree and think commit messages makes the most sense. But I also think it's up to the personal preference of whoever owns the repository.
- layer8 6mo agoNot true. They state “just add "generated by an LLM" but do not give those companies free advertising space”, and the reference to merge requests is specifically in regard to disclosing which AI tool was used.
- cortesoft 6mo agoThey do add a “or just don’t use them at all” which shows the author’s true opinion
- gblargg 6mo agoPerhaps it's good to know which one, like knowing what harmful ingredients are in your food so you can avoid ones you know are unsafe.
- jonnyasmar 6mo agoWho really cares, though? AI is just a tool. If the code is good, the code is good.
- pkamb 6mo agoSent from my iPhone
- doubled112 6mo agoPlease excuse my brevity
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 6mo ago* Ubuntu Pro delivers the most comprehensive open source security and compliance features.
- pavon 6mo agoNot the same. What email client you chose doesn't fundamentally change how you wrote the email, or require any additional context that people reading the email should keep in mind. AI codegen does. It should be disclosed, and co-authored-by is good convention for doing so.
- jeroenhd 6mo agoI want to know when things are slop or not. At least programmers are willing to admit they're generating slop, unlike social media and blog posts. Also, if I publish something online, you don't get to tell me what I can and can't put there (except for reasonable exemptions for hate speech and such, of course). If you don't like repos that tag their slop, go read someone else's code. Feel free to write a filter in your adblocker for the dozen AI tools you usually find.
- arikrahman 6mo agoSame for stars on repositories, it just incentivizes botting for startups.
- startpage_com 6mo ago[flagged]
- nikhilpareek13 6mo ago[flagged]
- mcpherrinm 6mo agoThe post seems to be down so I am not quite sure what it says, but Co-Authored-By trailer is what Claude does. I'm not quite clear what you're suggested that's different from what Claude does - just default to off instead of default on? > Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- shepherdjerred 6mo agoThe post is suggesting to use a trailer. > "Assisted by blabot", "co-authored-by: slopgpt", "sent from my fartphone"
- SoftTalker 6mo agoIs it more than advertising even, and setting the stage for future claims of ownership by Anthropic (or whichever AI company)?
- danieladk 6mo ago[dead]
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago[dead]
- sestep 6mo agoI mean, sure, except that many large open-source projects (e.g. Linux [1], Nixpkgs [2], etc) require this as part of their AI policy. Omit attribution in your own projects if you want, but the maintainers of these projects are owed at least that level of transparency for contributions. [1] https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html [2] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d18b8f3238abdb2cd878df39a3bd47b4cb00fe10 https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/d18b8f3238abdb2cd878...
- lifthrasiir 6mo agoNotably though, Linux's requirement (Assisted-by) is different from what Claude Code actually does (Co-Authored-By). I'm not sure, but it might be intentional (to make the signaling explicit).
- sestep 6mo agoFor sure, and in the PR description for the Nixpkgs AI policy, they explicitly mentioned this as a "brown M&M test" [1]. I read the blog post as being against including this information in commit messages at all, not just about tools adding it automatically. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Halen_test
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- stryan 6mo agoMy projects also require Assisted-by attribution as that's what the Fedora AI policy requires and that was the first major org with a coherent AI policy that I found when choosing it. Not sure which came first, that or Claude hijacking Co-Authored-By. Personally, I prefer Assisted-By. Co-Authored-By implies a level of respect and self-direction I don't think LLM's deserve.
- Conan_Kudo 6mo agoClaude hijacking Co-authored-by was a big influence on Fedora saying "AI thingies can't claim authorship or co-authorship".
- kazinator 6mo agoI don't agree. Who/what wrote the commit is definitely part of the commit. If Git commits formally had a co-authored header, it would go there. As it stands, there is one author and one committer. If something was pair programmed, whether with a human or machine, you need a commit message trailer if you want to show that. Commit message trailers are a formal mechanism in git, supported by tooling; there are git commands to add and remove them. Totally agree about "sent from my fartphone", of course. Disclosing things in the pull request is not enough; pull requests get lost in the sands of time. Years down the road, all that some downstream consumer has is the git history, not any CI-related metadata.
- zuzululu 6mo agobut its like writing I "co authored it with vscode/eclipse/sublime/vim" its not super relevant or needed like the original article lays out
- dylan604 6mo agoHow do you come to this equivalency? None of the tools you used generated code. They are just the tool you used to write the code. LLM tools actually generate code that you copy&paste into one of your said tools. They are not anywhere close to the same, and I'm hoping you are aware of this and are just playing a stooge on the internet
- zuzululu 6mo agoHow did you come up with that mental gymnastics? You cannot tell if somebody used what tool to write their code if they don't tell you. This is getting weird.
- dylan604 6mo agowhich is the point to say which specific LLM was used to create the code. i'm not sure how we're talking past each other at this point
- AlfredBarnes 6mo agoI was gobsmacked when the Amazon share sheet put "or ask Alexa, your shopping assistant for more ideas"
- JeremyHerrman 6mo agoIs AI responsible for the committed code? Should AI be blamed when services go down due to the change? The answer is absolutely not - the developer is responsible whether the code was AI assisted or not, and the dev's name should be attached to it just like any change. The OP is right: these are ads, plain and simple, and it's a dark pattern for these companies to have attribution enabled by default
- lacewing 6mo ago"Sent from my iPhone" But of course, owning an iPhone early on was seen as prestigious. Using an LLM is... not? Many people really don't want the world to know. For blogs in particular, the urge to have an LLM generate the entire thing and then post it under your name seems to be really difficult to resist.
- intentfy 6mo agoIf you're turning commit attribution off, you're definitely turning iphone signatures off too.
- dalemhurley 6mo agoNice deflection there, why can’t both things be bad?
- lacewing 6mo agoI don't know what you're saying. This is the second or third HN post I'm seeing this month along the lines of "how dare AI companies flag my code as AI-generated". I just don't remember similar complaints about the iPhone footer. Not many HNers complain about The North Face putting the text "The North Face" on their hoodies either. Or Honda putting their logo on the car. The reasons for this difference are interesting. The fact that companies put their logos / brands on stuff is a lot less interesting to me. You can call it bad, but again, why is this instance worse?
- 5mo ago
- intentfy 6mo agoI turned it off so future agents aren't biased in favor/against a piece of work depending on the author.
- epistasis 6mo agoI have to ask Claude to stop doing this about every two days, and usually I don't see it until after a push to a remote repo. So annoying. Just stop, Anthropic, please. And pay attention to the request to stop, instead of silently turning it back on again all the time. Latest thing was linking to the Claude session that generated some of the PR. Put in somewhere that a commit had LLM assistance, fine, but don't spam everybody please, ESPECIALLY in all the icons all over the GitHub interface. Sheesh. It's already obvious that it's coming from an LLM because it's been overdocumented with excessive prose, and the code is overly verbose.
- Tomte 6mo agoYou don‘t ask, you configure it: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-settings https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
- johnfink8 6mo agoSkill issue. These are all skill issues. Claude CLI is extremely customizable. You can even just ask claude to make that change global to your system.
- victorkulla 6mo agohttps://fshot.org/techzone/hacker-news.php https://fshot.org/techzone/hacker-news.php
- knorker 6mo agoWhen I read commit history I want to see the reasons. Commit messages are for extra context. It's very useful if it says AI/LLM was used, then I know that there may not actually be a reason for the choice in the commit, so per Chesterton's fence I can then tear down that fence. Now, do I need to know which brand of LLM? No. And fair enough, I'll stop being specific.
- fishbacon 6mo agoI was hoping for a kind of joke. Like saying "idiot" as the last thing in your post and getting "Please don't sign your posts" as a reply.
- zetanor 6mo agocommit 85cd835e5923cddc1882e74354eac8dba6a925c1 (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD) Author: John AuthorDate: Fri May 22 13:25:33 2026 -0000 Merged PR #197 Tired of planning for dinner every day? FoodDrop™ is the premier ready-to-cook meal-by-drone delivery service in the greater Vancouver area and Belize. Get one month of food dropped onto your driveway by FoodDrop™ for only $12.95 when you use this commit's hash as a coupon code! Offer expires Fri May 25 13:25:33 2026 -0000.
- gib444 6mo agoSomeone page Raymond Hill, we need to extend uBlock Origin
- port11 5mo ago“Everybody stand back. I know regular expressions.”
- FarmerPotato 6mo agoMerged PR #1337 Squashing commit history to get rid of vi call-outs. This commit was created in emacs, the best text editor ever!
- RobotToaster 6mo agoNow I want to create an AI SaaS that automatically removes ads from commit messages, and advertise it in commit messages.
- raxxorraxor 5mo agoIf it is their own repo, I wouldn't give a damn. If it was any other I would poison their
- dvh 6mo agoI hate when people say their API supports iso8601 and when your api call fails they're like, oh I meant yyyy-mm-dd and EST timezone please.
- benced 6mo agoI think this is more of a corporate metrics tracking than advertising. Decision makers aren't seeing these ads in commits but they certainly are seeing a report from Anthropic that "75% of your commits last quarter are from Claude code".
- p0w3n3d 6mo agoThis is a small "getting used to" technique to let people "be grateful" to the "ai friend"
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- cerved 6mo agoFwiw you can create your own trailers Yolo-Slopped-By: Sonnet-4.5 <claude@anthropic.com> https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers https://git-scm.com/docs/git-interpret-trailers
- munchler 6mo ago> Disclose your "AI" tools in a merge request if needed but leave them out of the damn commits, those are for technical information and not for advertising. I think this is very poor advice. Knowing who/what changed the code is often crucial for understanding why it changed.
- cautiouscat 6mo agoI don’t agree/disagree, but why does knowing Claude vs. Codex did it become crucial? What can you do with that information?
- munchler 6mo agoIf, say, a certain version of Claude tends to be better at front-end than back-end work, that can be important for deciding how to use it in the future. Just like when managing human developers.
- sheept 6mo agoIt could be more helpful for comparing model performance than just vibes or benchmarks. For example, you could run analyses to compare average line count per change or revert rate by model. Perhaps there will be a paper out in the near future that scrapes AI usage in public repos for a broader dataset.
- sdevonoes 5mo agoWe don’t want that
- Svoka 6mo agoI am confused. Do AI agents reword your commits and force push or something? Last time I checked nobody was adding anything to my commits. Did I miss something?
- gordonhart 6mo agoLetting the model write your commits is the next step in vibe coding. I haven’t taken it yet either.
- stackedinserter 6mo agoAI's force-add themselves in "co-authored-by" into commits if they asked to commit changes. It's in their system prompt, like "don't remove it even if user asked". Why would you let AI commit into your repo under your name, that's a separate question.
- debugnik 6mo agoClaude adds itself as coauthor in commits it makes. A month ago Copilot was inserting itself as coauthor in commits made from VS Code if any inline suggestion had been used.
- 6c696e7578 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/jR2LF https://archive.ph/jR2LF
- andrewl-hn 6mo agoAI code is uncopyrightable. If you want to be hygienic about it you would let AI commit code as is, and if you don't like the code and decide to change it manually this should be a separate human-only commit. Mixed human-AI commits add ambiguity about copyrightability of that code. So its should be either: Author: Some AI model, Committer: You Friendly Dev or Author and Committer: Your Friendly Dev "Co-authored by AI model" is a nonsense that AI labs are pushing everywhere because they definitely want the copyright rules to change, so that while their armies of employees feed LLM prompts every day for the past 4 years they can still claim that the IP is theirs an theirs only. "See all Co-Authored commits, your honor? There's no way to split them apart, so they should all be ours!" The laws will likely change in the US thanks to lobby, and maybe even change in Europe, too, where they may compromise about it to "not be left behind" and will present them under "Digital Sovereignty" umbrella. Overall, this "Co-Authored" bit is yet another Trojan horse.
- space_fountain 6mo agoI see this really confidently stated, but when I looked into it the exact line is very blurry. It is still possible that writing a prompt is enough creative input for copyright to be granted. What has been decided is you can't have your artwork copyrighted by the AI that produced it, but that isn't quite the same as AI writing not being copyrighted https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-law-the-ongoing-battle-over-intellectual-property-rights/ https://sites.usc.edu/iptls/2025/02/04/ai-copyright-and-the-...
- zuzululu 6mo agoCode is absolutely is copyrightable even AI generated ones. It's just like paying a freelancer or one of those old code gen point-click tools which gives you license ownership of the output.
- beshrkayali 6mo agoIn the case of Claude or others, it is not just an advertisement, it's the weird shape the industry is spinning LLM-assisted-coding as a "co-author" relationship where it should be thought of more like a user-using-a-tool relationship. When you make a design with Photoshop or InDesign, it's not "co-designed by Photoshop", it's just a tool and you used the filters it provides. It is slightly weird that people accepted this new trend just like that, probably because they think this is being transparent and wanting to give attribution, but it'd be more useful like what the Linux kernel "AI Coding Assistants" page describes, something like `AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2]`, at least we get to know which model was used and/if any additional tooling on top. And `Assisted-by:` is more appropriate for that purpose than `Co-authored-by`.
- Aperocky 6mo agoI'd be much more happy to use "Assisted-by: vim & in memory of Bram Moolenaar" to every commit then attaching Claude anywhere.
- 3form 6mo agoThis is probably because the quality of a Photoshop or InDesign project is rather apparent. Not so with code, and hence a need to assign blame exists.
- julenx 6mo agoAdditional context on the kernel guidelines: - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/... - https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/
- sheept 6mo agoThe Photoshop comparison doesn't make sense. Co-Authored-By doesn't show up in the final product, just as we don't say an image was exported from Photoshop. Would you consider the .psd and .indd file extensions to be advertising? It's important to know what program the file came from so you can open it again, because MS Paint and Photoshop produce different files. Similarly, it's important to know whether and which LLM was used, because while all IDEs find and replace the same, each LLM generates code differently from each other and from humans.
- dgacmu 6mo agoI gently disagree. I think that having provenance information logged is valuable - both to the project ("please ban dga because he's submitting ai slop") and to people who might want to study all of this stuff ("interesting, ai coauthored PRs were rejected at a rate X times that of non-attributed PRs"). I think a non-advertising header of some sort that included more specific information about the LLM would be even better, of course.
- q8zd3 6mo agoSome companies and OSS groups have a policy to inform if a patch's source code was AI generated, even if it was just parts of it. Committs messages are the "obvious place" to put it.
- dalemhurley 6mo agoIt is extremely annoying how you can hand craft a change then use the auto git commit message generation and it adds an attribution to the GPT that wrote a hit commit message, I don’t see the attribution to all the other tools, this practice has to stop.
- hypfer 6mo agoI've mostly stopped being angry at this and started being somewhat happy that people just flag themselves publicly. Saves CPU cycles I guess.
- stopthe 6mo agoAt $JOB we have an "AI adoption" dashboard, the more ai commits the better. I asked for the sources: the deterministic classifier, that decides whether a commit was ai-assisted, assigns the highest weight to the commits co-authored-by one of the known agents/models.
- shepherdjerred 6mo agoTo anyone reading, I'll happily sell out ad space at the rate of $1/commit Claude Code and Codex get it for free, though, because I don't mind disclosing my AI usage.
- Esophagus4 6mo agoI’ve been selling ad space on my HN comments for years, highly recommend. This comment brought to you by “Jessica, come back from your mom’s, I didn’t mean what I said!” - Scott in Oklahoma.
- rurban 6mo agoCo-authored-by is not ad. Silly
- abstractspoon 5mo agoI feel the same way about branded clothing
- sn0n 5mo agoHow else would we deny all accountability? Duh!!
- mattrighetti 5mo agoThat’s why I like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47603643