VS Code Flipped a Default. Your Commits Now Say Copilot Wrote Them.

One line.

vS Code 1.118 shipped with `git.addAICoAuthor` set to “all” by default. Your editor started appending “Co-Authored-by: Copilot ” to every commit you made. Even with Copilot disabled. Even with `chat.disableAIFeatures` set to true. You didn’t ask for it. You weren’t told.

Your Git history just changed.

That happened between May 3 and May 4.

microsoft issued a revert in 1.119 on Sunday. But if you pushed code during that window, your repo says Copilot authored it.

The Part Everyone’s Missing

The revert got all the attention.

Nobody’s talking about what the trailer actually means.

git’s Co-Authored-by trailer was built for humans. The U.S. Copyright Office has held three separate times that non-human entities can’t hold copyright. When your commit history claims Copilot co-authored your work, you’re making a copyright representation on behalf of something that has no legal standing to own code.

The Linux kernel caught this years ago. They require AI-generated contributions use “Assisted-by” instead. To keep the attribution honest.

to make sure the humans who wrote the code are the ones credited as the authors.

Now think about what that means for client work. If a client asks who wrote the code, your Git history says an AI did it. That matters for procurement forms. It matters for contracts that require human-authored work.

It matters when someone wants to know if they’re paying for a developer’s judgment or an autocomplete.

The editor bug is fixed.

Your repo history is not.

Who Knew and Shipped Anyway

Here’s the detail that should’ve been the headline.

Microsoft caught this in internal testing before the release. Principal Software Engineer Dmitriy Vasyura admitted it on the GitHub issue directly. They knew. They shipped anyway.

Said they “underestimated the impact.”

That’s not an engineering failure.

That’s a culture decision. The PM vibe-coded the one-line change with Copilot. A Copilot bot reviewed it. Vasyura merged it the next day with no description. It hit #1 on Hacker News with 654 comments and 372 thumbs-down on the PR before anyone got it pulled.

The recursion is the story. AI wrote it. AI reviewed it. AI shipped it. Millions of developers’ commit metadata changed without consent.

What Your History Says Right Now

Run this against every repo you’ve touched since May 3.

“`
git log –format=”%H %ae %s” | grep -i copilot
“`

If it returns anything, those commits carry the trailer.

You can’t selectively remove it from remote history without a force push, which has its own costs for any team sharing that branch.

Side note: 1.119 flipped the default back to “off,” but the setting itself didn’t disappear. Check your `.vscode/settings.json` explicitly. Set `git.addAICoAuthor` to “off.” Don’t assume the revert means you’re protected going forward if the next release decides “all” is a reasonable default again.

The Move Is Simple

Stop treating this like a quirky VS Code bug.

It’s a signal about how AI tooling makes decisions about attribution without asking permission. The teams that survive this aren’t the ones who trusted the default. They’re the ones who audit their history and set their tools to match what their work actually is.

Check your history. Set the flag explicitly. And watch for the next time your editor decides it knows better than you what your work should say.

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