Stop Advertising in Your Commits

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nature of AI Commit Footers: Advertising vs Signal

  • Many see “Co-authored-by: [AI]” as primarily advertising or a growth hack, akin to “Sent from my iPhone” default signatures.
  • Others argue it is a useful signal that code was AI-generated or assisted, especially for future readers of git history.
  • Some suggest neutral wording like “generated by an LLM” to avoid giving specific vendors free ad space.

Disclosure, Provenance & Project Policies

  • Several large projects (e.g., Linux, Nixpkgs, Fedora) require explicit AI attribution, often via trailers like Assisted-by:.
  • Supporters say commit history, not only PRs, should retain this provenance for long-term traceability, audits, and downstream users.
  • Some teams log AI usage for internal metrics and dashboards; AI footers are a key signal for such tracking.

Code Quality, Review Burden & “Slop”

  • Commenters complain about low-skill contributors spamming AI-generated “slop” PRs, increasing review burden.
  • Reviewers often distrust AI code more, citing harder verification, tendency to produce verbose or superficially-good-but-wrong code, and lack of learning/improvement.
  • Others counter that AI is just another tool; only the quality of the final code should matter.

Tool vs Co‑Author & Legal/Copyright Concerns

  • Strong disagreement over whether AI is a “co-author” or just a tool like a compiler, code generator, or IDE.
  • Some prefer Generated-by/Assisted-by over Co-authored-by to avoid anthropomorphizing and potential future ownership claims.
  • There is debate over copyright status of AI-generated code and whether mixing human+AI edits in a single commit complicates IP.

Data Collection, Scraping & RLHF

  • Some speculate AI vendors may correlate commit diffs with chat sessions for RLHF and quality signals; others doubt the effort is worth it given existing feedback channels.
  • A few note that explicit attributions might be more valuable to competitors or classifiers trying to detect AI-generated code.

Control, Customization & User Experience

  • Users report frustration with default-on attribution, AI adding itself even for minor tasks (e.g., commit-message generation), and needing to repeatedly disable it.
  • Others point out these tools can be configured to turn off attribution or use custom trailers.

Humor, Analogies & Cultural Friction

  • The thread is laced with jokes (fake ad commit messages, selling ad space in commits) and analogies (iPhone signatures, branded clothing, guns, Photoshop).
  • Some see the intensity of pro/anti-AI positions as quasi-religious, with ideology clashing against pragmatic use.