Microsoft Apologizes for Enabling AI Co-Author by Default in VS Code

Quick Summary

• Microsoft merged pull request #310226, which changed the default for the git.addAICoAuthor setting from "off" to "all".
• This caused VS Code to automatically insert a "Co-authored-by: Copilot" tag into Git commit messages whenever AI contributions were detected.
• However, due to technical bugs, the tag was added even when AI features were explicitly disabled or not used at all.
• Following intense community backlash on GitHub and Hacker News, Microsoft issued a public apology and reverted the default back to "off".

VS Code AI Co-Author Controversy

Microsoft recently changed a default setting in Visual Studio Code that caused a significant conflict with the developer community.

This change, introduced through pull request #310226, flipped the git.addAICoAuthor setting from "off" to "all". As a result, VS Code began automatically appending a "Co-authored-by: Copilot" signature to Git commit messages whenever it detected AI-assisted changes. The 'Co-authored-by' line appeared even for non-AI changes and for users who had opted out of AI features.

Technical Issues and Bugs

The rollout was met with immediate criticism because the feature was enabled without a clear notification to users. Developers reported several technical failures:

• Ignoring Settings: The feature continued to add the AI signature even for users who had explicitly set chat.disableAIFeatures to true.
• False Positives: A bug in the change-detection logic caused the editor to attribute entirely hand-written code to Copilot.
• Lack of Transparency: The attribution line was added silently in the background; it did not appear in the commit message UI where a developer could review or delete it before pushing code.

Community and Legal Concerns

The community response on platforms like GitHub and Hacker News was overwhelmingly negative, with many describing the move as "vandalism" or a "marketing stunt" to artificially inflate AI usage metrics.

Beyond the annoyance, users raised serious legal and copyright concerns. Since purely AI-generated content is often not eligible for copyright protection, developers worried that these tags could invalidate their ownership of the code or create complications during legal audits.

Some developers felt that falsely claiming AI co-authorship on a technical record was a breach of professional trust.

GitHub Copilot Actually Warned About This Change

GitHub Copilot’s own AI review actually warned Microsoft about the risks of this change before it was merged.

In an automated comment on the original pull request, the AI reviewer flagged that the configuration schema was "out of sync" with the runtime code, explicitly warning that this could lead to "unexpected behavior".

Despite this warning and a later admission by a Microsoft engineer that internal testers had also "caught" issues with the feature during development, the pull request was approved and merged anyway.

This is really a bad move by the VS Code developers.

Microsoft's Reversal

In response to the backlash, Microsoft's engineering team issued a public apology, acknowledging they had underestimated the impact of the change and failed to validate it properly.

Dmitriy Vasyura (dmitrivMS), a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, issued the following statement 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.

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.

Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI. I'll work on fixing those and meanwhile revert default to off in 1.119 update.

I am open to any (constructive) comments/suggestions - please feel free to reach me directly (my alias @microsoft.com) or open an issue on GitHub. Happy to answer anything here as well.

And then they quickly merged pull request #313931, which reverted the default for git.addAICoAuthor back to "off".

While Microsoft plans to fix the bugs and eventually offer the feature as an explicit opt-in, many developers remain wary of future "silent" changes to their development logs.

Final Thoughts

The "VS Code AI Co-Author Controversy" shows a fundamental clash between corporate AI metrics and developer professional standards.

While Microsoft framed the change as a feature for users who want attribution, the developer community viewed it as "vandalism" of technical and legal records.

The primary breach of trust was the "silent" nature of the feature. Because the attribution was added in the background and was not visible in the VS Code commit UI. It clearly violated the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) principle that developers rely on when signing off on their work.

Let us hope Microsoft will not repeat this mistake in future.