VS Code 1.118 Silently Tagged Your Commits with 'Co-Authored-by Copilot.' Developers Pushed Back.

VS Code 1.118 shipped on April 29, 2026 with a new feature enabled by default: any commit where GitHub Copilot touches your files now automatically gets a Co-Authored-by: GitHub Copilot <[email protected]> line appended to the commit message. The setting is called git.addAICoAuthor.

That’s a reasonable thing to want when Copilot is actually writing the code. The problem is it was running even when developers had turned AI features off entirely.

Reports started appearing on GitHub and Hacker News within 24 hours of the release. Developers checking their commit history found Copilot credited as a co-author on commits where they hadn’t used any AI assistance. The feature was opt-out, not opt-in, and the opt-out was not prominently documented in the release notes.

What the Setting Does

When git.addAICoAuthor is enabled (the new default), VS Code watches for Copilot-assisted edits and injects the co-author trailer into the commit message. The co-author trailer is a standard Git convention, originally defined for human collaborators, and platforms like GitHub render it as a secondary contributor on the commit.

The VS Code team’s stated rationale is transparency: if AI edited your code, that should be visible in source history. In principle, this is defensible. A lot of teams want to know how much of their codebase came from AI versus humans.

The implementation got ahead of the principle, though. Developers who had disabled Copilot chat, turned off autocomplete, or opted out of AI features entirely were still seeing the co-author tag. Several reports in the GitHub issue confirmed the behavior was not conditional on Copilot actually doing anything in that session.

Microsoft’s Response

Dmitriy Vasyura, the developer at Microsoft behind the feature, acknowledged the problem directly on GitHub. The feature “should never have run with AI features disabled,” he said, and it shouldn’t have tagged commits as AI-generated when no AI was involved. He committed to reverting the default setting in version 1.119.

There was no formal statement from Microsoft. Vasyura’s GitHub comments were the response.

The broader reaction on Hacker News leaned toward the same frustration that has followed several recent Microsoft/Copilot decisions: AI attribution that benefits Microsoft’s adoption metrics appears as a default, and removing it requires developers to dig through settings. Whether that’s the actual intent or just a consequence of how the feature was shipped, the pattern is consistent enough that people noticed.

Why It Matters

The co-author line isn’t cosmetic. Two specific concerns came up repeatedly in the discussion.

Copyright. The U.S. Copyright Office has consistently held that non-human authors cannot hold copyright. If Copilot is listed as a co-author on code, it raises questions about the copyright status of that code and whether your organization actually owns what you’re shipping. Most enterprises haven’t thought through what happens when a non-human entity starts appearing in their git history as a contributor.

AI policy compliance. Some organizations restrict how much AI-generated code can be in their codebase, either because of licensing concerns, client contracts, or internal governance rules. An automated co-author tag that runs without explicit human action makes it harder to audit compliance, and potentially creates false positives in any tooling that scans commit metadata for AI contribution.

Neither of these is a new problem. AI coding tools have been blurring the line between human and machine authorship since they launched. But forcing attribution into git history by default, without a clear trigger, makes the ambiguity concrete and unavoidable in a way that was easy to defer before.

How to Turn It Off

If you’re on 1.118 and want to disable it now:

Open VS Code settings (Cmd+, on macOS, Ctrl+, on Windows/Linux) and search for Git: Add AI Co Author. Turn it off. Alternatively, add this to your settings.json:

"git.addAICoAuthor": false

Version 1.119 is expected to change the default back to false, which would require developers to actively opt in before commits get tagged.

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Sources: VS Code 1.118 Release Notes, GitHub Issue #313064, The Decoder, Agent Wars, Hacker News discussion