Stop Advertising in Your Commits

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

AI coding assistants that automatically add “Co-authored-by” lines or similar tags to git commits are drawing scrutiny for blurring the line between disclosure and advertising. Commenters debate whether naming specific commercial tools in commit messages meaningfully improves transparency, provenance, and metrics tracking, or simply clutters project history while giving vendors free promotion and potential legal leverage over authorship. Many argue for neutral, opt‑in attribution such as “Assisted-by: LLM” or project-specific trailers, especially as open source projects and companies begin to require explicit AI usage notices in version control.

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.