Developers fired up their terminals. Committed code they’d written themselves. Checked the logs. There it was: Co-authored-by: Copilot . Even when Copilot sat idle. Even with AI features switched off.
This glitch wasn’t random. A quiet pull request flipped a switch in VS Code. Suddenly, Git commits across the world carried an unwanted AI byline. Microsoft scrambled to fix it. But the damage lingered.
The saga began in February 2026 with VS Code version 1.110. Release notes introduced git.addAICoAuthor, a setting to append co-author trailers for AI-generated code. Options: off (default), chatAndAgent, or all. Only commits from VS Code itself qualified. Git blame tooltips would show these co-authors too. Clean. Opt-in. No drama. As detailed in the official VS Code 1.110 update notes.
Then April 15. Pull request #310226 hit the VS Code repo. Titled “Enabling ai co author by default.” Author: cwebster-99. One key edit in extensions/git/package.json: default shifted from "off" to "all". Now it tagged every AI-involved change, including inline completions. Copilot AI itself flagged a mismatch in runtime fallback during review. Dmitriy Vasyura approved anyway. Merged April 16. Milestone: 1.117. No release notes. No user alerts. See the full PR discussion.
Commits flowed. 1.4 million on GitHub, by some counts. Developers noticed. One posted in GitHub community: “The most concerning part is that I had already checked the commit message before committing… This means the message I reviewed before committing was not the final content that ended up in Git history.” Trailer added post-finalization. Invisible in VS Code’s UI. Uneditable. As reported in a GitHub discussion.
Complaints piled up. Attribution appeared despite chat.disableAIFeatures: true. Despite zero Copilot use. Reddit threads. Hacker News. X posts. “Unacceptable in a professional development workflow,” one developer vented. TechRadar covered the uproar.
Microsoft’s Quick Reversal
May 3. Commit d6c8e29 via PR #313931. Default snapped back to off. New checks: respect disableAIFeatures. Skip if no AI entitlement. No trailers for non-AI changes. Landed in upcoming 1.119. View the fixing commit.
Dmitriy Vasyura stepped up on Hacker News. The approver owned it. “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.” No malice, he said. “There was no ill intent by [an] evil corporation, but rather a desire to support functionality that some customers expect of VS Code [with regard to] AI-generated code.” Fix incoming: “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.” Full thread at Hacker News.
Why It Stings: Trust, Legal Shadows, and AI Overreach
Developers don’t shrug this off. Git commit metadata matters. Audits. Code reviews. IP disputes. Ownership trails. A false AI co-author? Muddy waters. What if insurers or courts scrutinize? “Authorship has legal implications,” one commenter noted on Reddit.
Broader backlash too. VS Code dominates—70% market share. But forced AI? Echoes prior gripes: telemetry opt-outs, extension bloat. “How can I trust VSCode going forward?” one HN user asked. Switches to Zed, Neovim whispered. The Register detailed the fallout.
And the intent? Vasyura cited customer expectations. Other tools auto-attribute. Fair. But defaults matter. Opt-in builds trust. Opt-out breeds revolt. This flip? Sloppy process. No A/B tests. No docs. Merged in hours amid 372 thumbs-down reactions.
Scale hits hard. Millions of devs. Billions in Copilot subs. GitHub touts 150 million users. One bad default rewrites history en masse. It’s FOSS called it sneaky.
Microsoft learns. Again. Copilot integrations dialed back before—after token-throttling complaints. Now this. Devs want tools, not minders. AI assists. Doesn’t own.
Version 1.119 drops soon. Settings honored. Attribution explicit. But scars remain. Next time, ask first. Developers build the code. And the trust.
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