One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI".
Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.
It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.
When I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned.
Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.
Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?
I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.
If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.
To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?
Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.
Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.
AI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything.
It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.
I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.
Good products are not profitable enough. Not that good products are profitable at all, but if it doesn't make disgusting amounts of money this quarter it's not worth considering at all.
We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death
Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.
Has always been the case. Corporations hate standards and would rather lock you in except where market forces prevent them. It was a miracle we have something like the internet - and the government had to create it.
Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.
These next few years are the real turning point. If they are right about AI and robotic workforces, then it's checkmate--they don't need us anymore, and we're next for the furnace. If they're wrong... well, I don't know... Will there be any consequences? Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.
There will always be jobs for private security, firefighters, and utility repairmen to protect / restore the data centers when people inevitably attack them.
There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.
Why will there always be these jobs, if the technofascists are right? They're creating enslaved sentience. Even the class traitor police want a union, fight for more pay.
What's uniquely un-automate-able about those jobs in their dream future?
Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago.
Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.
I see one profitable enterprise for AI that involves spying on everyone, managing their lives (or otherwise) tightly, automating foreign conquests and needing to make only the top decisions while delegating everything else, like a king. I can see a group or one could say a class of people that would happily invest in such future.
Exactly. I keep saying, AI is not useful to us. There will be no AI companies.
Even this supposed profitable enterprise, the people involved are absolutely too moronic to be able to control the thing they try to invent, it will just be a matter of time before it turns around and eliminates them as well...
Some are piling on masses of debt to built capacity (eg. Oracle). Others are just reinvesting the profits from the rest of their company (eg. Google, Meta).
Anthropic’s moat is their best tool, Claude Code.
OpenAI’s moat is the brand of ChatGPT, once the fastest growing app in the history of the world.
It’s possible that open weight models keep pace, but it’s also possible that the investment to train them becomes prohibitively expensive and open weight models cease to keep pace with the large foundation model companies.
I really don't think open models will lose. I think they are cheaper to train because they have to be more efficient than the monstrosities we have now.
There is no theory that says the current frontier models cannot exist in models with 1/100th the compute waste ;). When we start trending in that direction, and oh wow we truly are, there will be no reason for these services. You could run them on your own hardware without serious investments.
The moat openai and anthropic have is them among others have attempted to buy all of the computer hardware for the next two years. That's intentional. They know the only existential threat to them is anyone coming up with a way to do this better than them. It's already happened and it's going to become more and more divergent.
I haven't read the claims, so I don't know how easy it will be to work around them. This particular one seems to cover encoder-decoder networks, so it's not necessarily applicable to later LLM implementations. But I'd be amazed if Google didn't have several other relevant patents in their arsenal.
Initially I assumed that when the bubble burst, some VCs would go bust, Oracle would go bust, a few hyperscalers would take a significant haircut but carry on, and life would pretty much go on. However there's now sufficient dodgy AI-related debt making its way onto the debt markets that the bubble burst could be a lot messier, and it may be more than a few percent.
A few percent of your net worth, when you're sitting on top of a pile of gold like a dragon on a yacht is one thing, but when you're a retiree, and you're on a fixed income, living off the proceeds from an annuity and a reverse mortgage, and inflation in all its forms is eating into the plan you had, and you don't have any backup, yes there will be consequences!
People (well, American people (disclosure, I am an American)), used to be scared/worried that Silicon Valley will eventually move to Bangalore or Shenzhen, because of wage-discrepancies, and so on -- and it is not a totally unreasonable concern, considering that the _Silicon_ part of Silicon Valley has been slowly relocated to Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and a few others. At this point, maybe we should start pushing that the _rest_ of Silicon Valley gets relocated somewhere else, too.
It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.
One things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI.
We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.
Didn’t get the “scary” part. I also keep my entertainment to the minimum dependencies possible. I try to rely on stuff I own: music cds, iso videogames + emulators, physical books or ebooks (thanks Anna), exercise outdoors… ditching streaming like netflix/youtube, buying crap on amazon, uber, etc
It’s the combination of AI changing the workplace, the large techs shedding double digit headcount, recruiting / hiring departments being so broken by the AI arms race hitting job applications, and the macro business environment generally being on the downward slope at the moment.
This feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it
Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.
Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.
Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?
If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.
Chrome is a now-somewhat-archaic term for GUI (or specifically the actual elements of the GUI, not the concept), and Netscape/Mozilla did use the term a lot. Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).
In my circles it literally was the same people. Instead of trying to get me to buy ETH they started talking only via LLMs. Unsurprisingly we aren't in touch anymore... Maybe they are happier with their chatbots, I'll never know that's for sure
See how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship.
I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh
If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.
I said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth.
Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not.
Your knowledge and understanding of things is so limited and wrong that it's dumb even to discuss it with you. I will however serve the public interest by correcting some of your gross misinformation. Crypto encompasses stablecoins, commodity tokens, also countless other tokens representing stocks, and it facilitates immediate and permissionless transfer of funds, all of which go well above and beyond being a store of wealth.
Who is building their company using permission-less blockchain as the database? The average person still uses a bank checking account, not replacing it with a crypto account.
I haven’t heard of any progress on tokens in the Governance direction.
Stablecoins without a public audit trail have so far stayed relevant, but there are several which are suspiciously reminiscent of the mistakes that SBF made.
We all see the transfer of funds and the ostensible store of wealth when it comes to buying influence or presidential pardons. Those of us not wearing crypto-colored glasses don’t see the promise that VCs sold us on the industry 5-10 years ago.
I never spoke about NFTs nor do I have to speak about them, not today and not ever, so save your bait. It's in the same way that you didn't speak about bank bailouts, so I won't bait you into it.
Most people obviously use multiple accounts of different types. Those who have crypto wallets will never reveal them to you in the interest of their privacy.
Stablecoin firms make so much cash via interest that they're easily over-capitalized.
If you're foolish enough to be manipulated by VC interests, that's your own fault. I would focus on the tech, not on what VCs want you to believe. This applies generally, irrespective of the sector. I don't know why this is hard to understand.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.
"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.
This feels like the modern version of 'Sent from my iPhone' but much more invasive. Git commits are legal and technical records. Falsifying who authored a piece of code just to pump up AI usage stats is a huge breach of trust and it is disappointing to see Microsoft prioritize branding over the integrity of the developer's log.
I expect my IDE to record what happened, not what the marketing department wants people to think happened.....
Good point. That fake commit addendum means that the entire commit contents would not be under copyright protection. AI generated code is not currently copyrightable.
Yeah the current guidance from US copyright office is that if it were said to be solely authored by copilot it would not be eligible for copyright. If it were said to be solely authored by human A (who happened to use co-pilot) the elements and arrangement of it not generated by co-pilot would be copyrightable. I’m not sure the copyright office has released guidance on attempting to register AI as a co-author I assume the registration would be rejected but you’d be able to re-submit as sole Human author.
The best part is that copilot commented on the PR saying that this doesn’t actually change the behaviour, creates inconsistency in the codebase and suggested reverting the change! (This comment seems to have been ignored…)
> The configuration schema default was changed to "all", but the runtime fallback in extensions/git/src/repository.ts still calls config.get('addAICoAuthor', 'off'). This is now out of sync and can lead to unexpected behavior in contexts where the contributed configuration defaults aren't loaded (e.g., some tests/hosts), and it makes the intended default unclear. Update the runtime fallback to match the schema default (or omit the fallback so the contributed default is used).
I also liked the bot posting screenshot diffs that are all false positives, while apparently not capturing the default change (is it not in some menu somewhere?)
That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver.
This kind of tagline marketing works best with people people who aren't even aware that they're participating, and who aren't bothered to do anything different it even if they become aware.
The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so the marketing remains.
Sent from my iPhone
Downloaded from Demonoid
Rusty n Edie's: The world's friendliest BBS 216-726-0737
But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.
I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.
But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.
100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.
I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors
However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.
"sent from my iphone" originally meant more than just "i have a fancy phone that lets me send email" in the early days it meant "I'm not at my desk right now."
There is more of it that's going on. For me, Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard app sabotages the use of a competing search engine (DuckDuckGo) in Firefox in Android for me. When typing a multi-word double-quoted search phrase, it doesn't allow it to be typed correctly.
Isn’t this a kind of “leopards ate my face” situation? I thought we had all “agreed” that letting AI write code and take control of software repositories is good, even if we have no idea what is going on beyond a thin surface layer, because well it’s fast and we can fix it later and lol who needs testing? My customers are my testers.
And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?
The sneaky commit modification is triggered by very modest usage of AI such as auto-completion.
Look, if an agent writes the code and the commit message then adding a Co-authored-by by default is ok. Not even showing it before the commit is made is not, and adding the message when AI was just completing code is not.
I genuinely think it's not ok even then. Copilot is a tool, one of many I use. That tool has no business polluting commit messages without my knowledge.
The appended message isn't even adding any new information, as in this day and age a vast majority of commits is probably "co-authored" by an LLM.
I should have been clearer, the hidden addition is never ok.
If I ask Claude to write a commit message, it will inserted a co-author line (and an ad), but I can see it and disapprove, add a counter instruction to CLAUDE.md etc
My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.
Jeez, you can see many things wrong with this new all-in AI direction that Microsoft is taking. Commit by a product manager, who probably actually never digged through the code before…automated ai review not catching the problem, and the vibe codes pr introduction the error itself
That happens in most speech to text systems, even Superwhisper, Monologue and Wispr Flow. I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio and happens when there is silence. I guess it depends on the model but most of them are based on Whisper which has this problem
Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.
At no point in time companies were so desperate for developer attention. It feels like the general consensus is it is a “winner takes it all” race, and everyone has to add as many dark patterns as possible to increase stickiness.
Time to leave for something else if you haven't already, vscode has been good to us but this kind of behavior is only going to ramp up as Microsoft seeks to get a return on their AI investments.
The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent.
Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop.
I can't wait for:
* The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent copyright for machine generated code.
* The first company to get nailed to the wall for reverse engineering and replicating high profile copyrighted code, like Windows.
Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool
For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either
"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated
The real question is why Anthropic was able to use DMCA takedown requests "in good faith" against the Claude leaks when their own CTO claimed it is a 100% slopcoded codebase, and they themselves argue that all LLM generated code is transformed enough to not be copyrightable. Which they have to state without being able to turn back because they violated millions of book and software licenses during training.
A lot of bitching about Microsoft here, for something Claude has been doing forever. I have a git hook that rejects any commit containing the line Co-authored by Claude
That's a fair point, but claude code is not an editor (yet?), and when you use claude code, and allow it to commit things, it's almost certainly "co-authored by llm".
Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.
Well claude does it if you ask it to commit instead of you, and it lets you review it, this is not the case with this feature - judging by the comments on PR. Sometimes it says co-authored by copilot even when the code is not generated by AI. Also it will never say co-authored by claude or whatever, always copilot. Also why would my IDE care about this and not the AI itself?
Are you ashamed of other people finding out you used Claude? I think the co-authored-by bit should not be a setting at all, AI-generated code should be clearly identified.
Let AI autonomously produce code of a quality that I care about and I might consider giving it credit. I don't know how other people write code but I come up with an idea and use a multitude of LLMs to brainstorm a reasonably comprehensive spec that any reasonably competent person can read and produce a working program from, including a locally working Q2 quant of Qwen 3.6. Even Kimi is as good as Claude at most coding tasks, and I don't see why any single agent deserves any credit for my design.
Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.
Do Adobe or Arri or Red get authorship credit for the work their hardware and software do on projects? After all, artists would not be able to produce a single pixel without them. In a similar vein, you could make the argument that modern farming is sitting on your ass in your modern tractor while software handles most of the work. Does John Deere get rights over a quarter/half your harvest?
I am stuck between the luddites and "artisanal" coders on this one. LLMs are neither as smart/useful or as dumb/useless as people think. Unless your job involves producing useless garbage every single day, good software requires a lot of thought before the first line of code is even written. For those with serious domain knowledge, the thinking time can be compressed into minutes/hours rather than days/weeks it might take.
LLMs are a tool. You either pay for it or you use the freely available ones on your own hardware. As long as the output is directed by my thinking, the output belongs to me. If it were up to me, I would abolish IPR (and even permanent ownership of land) as a category altogether, but that is a different discussion.
Basically what you’re saying is that if AI does anything on your computer, anything the AI impacts you should lose control over. If the AI touched it at all in any way, big or small, you now lose ownership of the actions your computer takes (on open source tools, I might add).
In case you need reminding of common sense, I’m supposed to be allowed to decide what my commit messages are because it’s my fucking computer.
I prefer that my software is not a morality police.
I think the Linux kernel's standard of disclosure via the "Assisted-By" trailer is the right move.
Makes it clear you used a bullshit machine, without implying it's an author.
...assuming you think using them at all is a good move - I won't deny they have some utility (though I'd argue much lower than many seem to think), but I do presently believe they're a disaster for humanity.
The ruination of the Internet with slop, the massive propagation of propaganda, and the insanely easy-to-wield tools for abuse are in no way worth the ability to accrue tech debt at 10x velocity (though to be clear, accruing tech debt can absolutely be a useful strategy, if one I personally dislike).
mind-boggling people are trying to hide this, tells you all you need to know about our “profession.” presence of that hook or the like
in a place of business should be fireable offense
I've never had Claude Code in VSCode add attribution to a commit when I didn't use it. VSCode is adding the attribution even when you have all copilot features disabled and therefore could not have used it.
I personally don't mind if an AI inserts it's "Co-Authored by" tag into commits it has worked on - it's transparency, I used its help and it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad.
But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.
> it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad
Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.
Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.
I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?
DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?
I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?
It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.
The LLM is just a database. Would you be fine if this was done when cribbing stuff from Github, StackOverflow, tutorials and so on, or do you think some databases are more special than others in this regard, and if so, on what merit?
Right because of course you wouldn’t provide an explanation for why such a change would be made.
Providing zero description or background or explanation for why a change is made is probably the only thing that pisses me off as much as a pure AI-slop description of a change: your job in a PR description is to give the background for why a change is being made. Honestly, any PR which doesn’t do this should be insta-closed by policy. But it totally tracks with the level of quality I’d expect from the company in question.
Having to scroll through 3 screens worth of giant automated comments on the linked PR before seeing any comments written by humans is the cherry on top.
So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.
AI generated code is not copyrightable anyway. The only real question is how much "copiloting" you have to get ownership, and right now the courts seem to be heading towards it not mattering if AI was involved
I got tired of Claude adding their signatures to my commits against my instructions (the settings schema changed at some point), so I added a commit-msg hook that blocks multi-line commits. Easy and works like a charm, and would block this sort of M$ intrusion.
I saw this the other day and was pretty confused - I prefer to write my own commit messages and wondered if I’d accidentally let the AI do it this time. Nope, just MS changing things behind my back. Sigh.
Wasn’t it discussed here that no copyrights apply to code generated by AI? I’m asking myself whether adding "Co-authored-by: Copilot" means the code is not protected by the GPL, or even allows Microsoft to own your code...
There's a large gap between what they do (same env var disables this since the beginning) vs Microsoft bucking it's way through AI coauthorship credit in a multi potential author china shop, though.
Well, that's good news for all the developers working at companies with delusional management proclaiming "100% of code will be written by AI in 6 months"!
I really hope the editor wars don't start again. I've been happily using VsCode for years now. More than happy in fact, it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used, as evidenced by how AI companies basically started as a VsCode fork.
But this is going full-throttle on enshittification.
WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?
I've been using *nix and usenet since the early 1990's.
I always thought "editor wars" was a particularly dumb in-joke among a small group and I feel sad when I see people who think it was ever more than that.
The Wikipedia page cites "The Jargon File" as an authoritative source of truth. Ridiculous.
Honestly not sure how viable that is long term with the way the pricing kinda needs to go. I think the recent copilot price increase is just the tip of the iceberg.
Unfortunately, Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish, Microsoft supported LSPs just work better in VSCode, they are better integrated, and Zed can't do anything about LSPs memory or peformance.
One could think that.
But VSCode is the one that occasionally failed to simply render text.
No idea what happened these handful of times, but the UI was just completely screwed up, as if it were one of these "scratch to reveal" games, but with the file’s content (and unresponsive, obviously).
One fascinating thing about the whole AI phenomenon is how incredibly hostile it is to _standards_. Whether something works properly, or is ethical, or is true, no longer matters at all; all that matters is "pls use our AI".
Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
And it's not just them. There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX. Now, on macOS Google remaps CMD-G in Google Docs to launch some LLM bullshit (EDIT: huh, they may have fixed this; it was definitely doing it a couple of weeks ago), because, after all, it has only had a standard universal meaning on macOS for about three decades, no big deal.
It's a complete takeover of technically incompetent management that feels like it can finally execute their ideas to the fullest instead of relying on those pesky swengs with their obstructions, complaints and problems. We'll soon get the management utopia everywhere.
Principal engineer balks at bad UX when the PM should know better (it's their job)
2023: Ah well I guess we can't do it
2025: you're fired. Hey kid we hired two weeks ago, implement bad idea please
To be fair, it was already done by bad managers long before.
That's how I got my first opportunity 20 years ago
:'D
When I've been working on stuff that requires a SSO login, I noticed that it makes, what I considered, hostile anti-user choices in defaulting to tracking pieces of information I didn't want to track and hadn't mentioned.
Fair that I didn't instruct it explicitly to make more pro-user choices, it just seemed to think slurping as much information into the backend was an default intention. Wasted a few more tokens to iterate on it to remove things, but it was IMO interesting enough that I finally submitted feedback around what I imagine is an interesting training problem.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation. And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
Probably they thought the new generations forgot about how awful they were in the not so distant past.
I think they set it all on fire because greed got the better of them again.
> greed
Is a greed/not greed scale really useful to discuss company behaviors ?
I wanted to say I get what you mean, but even thinking about the company I root for the most, I can't think of a point where they're not driven by their desire to make a lot more money.
If your point is that there's good and bad ways to seek money, I'm not sure it's properly encompassed by "greed", which I interpret as the intensity of a desire, not its nature or validity.
To you "greed" might mean something else, but is it properly conveyed ?
Approximately everybody would like more money.
Greedy people put the desire for more money above the welfare of the business, themselves, and other. Greedy people literally put their desire for more personal wealth above the very lives of others.
Greed/not greed is a very fair way of putting it. One can operate a business that requires profit without wanting to destroy everyone and everything that stands in the way of more money.
AI psychosis. Divide between rich and poor. They live in their own golden bubbles and there's no sanity checks. The workers are so far removed from the realm of competentance and influence it's just CEOs and VPs trying to pump the next 6 months stock value regardless of anything.
It's like the zeitgeist has decided the only thing that matters is their own farts and how they dont smell.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.
Mmm... I think I missed that part.
Not everyone bought it, but they campaigned hard...and now see it was all just a dog and pony show. The hold-outs were right...
They invested billions. They're scared.
> They invested billions. They're scared.
They could have shipped a good product with all those billions they spent in reinventing Clippy.
I have this feeling that their bet was that all the Microsoft shops will jump on Copilot without looking at alternatives, so they did not really have to make it as good as their competition.
Making good products simply no longer seems to be on the agenda for most of these companies.
Good products are not profitable enough. Not that good products are profitable at all, but if it doesn't make disgusting amounts of money this quarter it's not worth considering at all.
We've reached the phase of "infinite shareholder growth" where physics says no, and that is so unacceptable that we'd rather burn down the entire global economy than accept less than exponential growth. It isn't that growth is impossible either, there just can't be enough growth. Break-even is apparently a fate worse than death
Microsoft continues to make billions in profit despite its spending on AI, because it has a diversified business that generates revenue. I don't get why they would be "scared"? It's basically a calibrated risk at that level.
> They could have shipped a good product with all those billions
They did. It's called Azure: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-tops-wall-street-exp...
That's largely a product of work in the 2010s. What's their next Azure? Clippy on steroids probably won't cut it.
They invested billions. They can exit in 6 months if this thing stays afloat.
I don't think it's fear; it's greed.
Has always been the case. Corporations hate standards and would rather lock you in except where market forces prevent them. It was a miracle we have something like the internet - and the government had to create it.
Microsoft's decade-long PR rehabilitation has worked wonders for them.
The only question is "number go up?": will this result in more money from investors or not?
Its even worse in my eyes, they dont even offer a model they themselves maintain.
Not that surprising when you consider the monumental investments. It's heinous but right in line with modern corporate business ethics.
> And then set fire to the whole thing in an offering to their robot gods.
It's the bourgeoisie dream: A means of production that also does the labor 24/7 and can't complain, infinitely spawnable. Theoretical slavery+, so of course they're throwing everything into the furnace for it.
These next few years are the real turning point. If they are right about AI and robotic workforces, then it's checkmate--they don't need us anymore, and we're next for the furnace. If they're wrong... well, I don't know... Will there be any consequences? Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.
There will always be jobs for private security, firefighters, and utility repairmen to protect / restore the data centers when people inevitably attack them.
There will be a period of rapid change. If we are lucky, the political class will see and adjust policy quickly. Otherwise we will see US urban areas gutted like the Rust Belt was after NAFTA / WTO. They are making the same mistakes but in a different industry.
Why will there always be these jobs, if the technofascists are right? They're creating enslaved sentience. Even the class traitor police want a union, fight for more pay.
What's uniquely un-automate-able about those jobs in their dream future?
Google will definitely lose. Llms supplants search. But not the old document search which they stopped doing long ago.
Add in the fact that open weight models are 6-12 months behind frontier models means AI companies aren’t building a moat, they’re on a treadmill. And treadmills don’t justify the valuations OR the hype.
AI companies are in trouble.
I see one profitable enterprise for AI that involves spying on everyone, managing their lives (or otherwise) tightly, automating foreign conquests and needing to make only the top decisions while delegating everything else, like a king. I can see a group or one could say a class of people that would happily invest in such future.
Exactly. I keep saying, AI is not useful to us. There will be no AI companies.
Even this supposed profitable enterprise, the people involved are absolutely too moronic to be able to control the thing they try to invent, it will just be a matter of time before it turns around and eliminates them as well...
Not all AI companies are the same.
Some are piling on masses of debt to built capacity (eg. Oracle). Others are just reinvesting the profits from the rest of their company (eg. Google, Meta).
Anthropic’s moat is their best tool, Claude Code.
OpenAI’s moat is the brand of ChatGPT, once the fastest growing app in the history of the world.
It’s possible that open weight models keep pace, but it’s also possible that the investment to train them becomes prohibitively expensive and open weight models cease to keep pace with the large foundation model companies.
I really don't think open models will lose. I think they are cheaper to train because they have to be more efficient than the monstrosities we have now.
There is no theory that says the current frontier models cannot exist in models with 1/100th the compute waste ;). When we start trending in that direction, and oh wow we truly are, there will be no reason for these services. You could run them on your own hardware without serious investments.
The moat openai and anthropic have is them among others have attempted to buy all of the computer hardware for the next two years. That's intentional. They know the only existential threat to them is anyone coming up with a way to do this better than them. It's already happened and it's going to become more and more divergent.
What does their patent moat look like?
Google owns the core transformer patent(s), for one thing, e.g. https://patents.google.com/patent/US10452978B2/en.
I haven't read the claims, so I don't know how easy it will be to work around them. This particular one seems to cover encoder-decoder networks, so it's not necessarily applicable to later LLM implementations. But I'd be amazed if Google didn't have several other relevant patents in their arsenal.
I guess if they are wrong the world economy crashes and burn again, because they wasted all these shiny dollars on infra build out. It's lose lose.
Initially I assumed that when the bubble burst, some VCs would go bust, Oracle would go bust, a few hyperscalers would take a significant haircut but carry on, and life would pretty much go on. However there's now sufficient dodgy AI-related debt making its way onto the debt markets that the bubble burst could be a lot messier, and it may be more than a few percent.
A few percent of your net worth, when you're sitting on top of a pile of gold like a dragon on a yacht is one thing, but when you're a retiree, and you're on a fixed income, living off the proceeds from an annuity and a reverse mortgage, and inflation in all its forms is eating into the plan you had, and you don't have any backup, yes there will be consequences!
> Maybe a few people lose a few percent of their net worth.
the entire US economy rides on this now so it’ll be more than few people and a lot more than few percent.
People (well, American people (disclosure, I am an American)), used to be scared/worried that Silicon Valley will eventually move to Bangalore or Shenzhen, because of wage-discrepancies, and so on -- and it is not a totally unreasonable concern, considering that the _Silicon_ part of Silicon Valley has been slowly relocated to Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and a few others. At this point, maybe we should start pushing that the _rest_ of Silicon Valley gets relocated somewhere else, too.
It's a breeding ground for Edisons and Morgans, not Teslas. It is profoundly depressing that SV is doing everything it can (knowingly or unknowingly, not sure which is worse) to get the entire planet to stop taking it seriously and to shun it.
Turns out it's not infinitely spawnable after all.
There's a lot of flaws with their fantasy world, that's not even the most prominent one.
BUT it is a trap: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.20617v1
One things for sure I won't be buying any SaaS, streaming, or ordering from Amazon if I have no future prospects for work. I already stopped most of my subscriptions because of a layoff unrelated to AI.
We buy food and go for walks as entertainment. It's been refreshing but also obviously scary.
Didn’t get the “scary” part. I also keep my entertainment to the minimum dependencies possible. I try to rely on stuff I own: music cds, iso videogames + emulators, physical books or ebooks (thanks Anna), exercise outdoors… ditching streaming like netflix/youtube, buying crap on amazon, uber, etc
Scary = “if I have no future prospects for work”
It’s the combination of AI changing the workplace, the large techs shedding double digit headcount, recruiting / hiring departments being so broken by the AI arms race hitting job applications, and the macro business environment generally being on the downward slope at the moment.
Scary part is not having a job right now that's all. It's not scary walking around getting smoke vitamin d
This feels like the same mechanism for climate change. The actors dont care since they're not completely responsible for that outcome and benefit from ignoring it
> There was a time that Google cared deeply about UX
Have we been using the same Google?
Their search homepage was supposed to be minimal. I was at a tech talk given by Google sometime around 2012 and they said that their ad service is not under any circumstances allowed to slow down the page load - if the ads don't return before the page is ready the pager is rendered without ads.
Chrome had so many great ux choices originally, such as tabs all staying the same size when you were closing them so that you could close multiple easily and only resizing after a second or two (that stopped working around a year ago). Hell there are even rumours that Chrome is called Chrome because it was a polished UX.
Their original products were so smooth compared to what was there before. Search compared to altavista, mail compared to Hotmail, both compared to Yahoo!. I really don't know where your perspective comes from. GCP?
If i remember chrome:// used to have special meaning in Firefox (and probably well before that), and was used to tweak UI settings. I always assumed this was where Google took the name from.
Chrome is a now-somewhat-archaic term for GUI (or specifically the actual elements of the GUI, not the concept), and Netscape/Mozilla did use the term a lot. Google claims that their browser is called Chrome because of an association with fast cars (presumably Google was keen to market it to extremely old people, chrome not having been a particularly big thing in cars for a very long time).
Admittedly, it's a while ago. But original gmail, say, really did put a huge amount of effort into it.
We have. That's why the parent said _there was a time_, implying that this is no longer true.
Some people seem to think they cared, at some point. I’m not one of them.
AI is the ultimate grifting tool, grifters gonna grift.
5 years ago it was blockchain & NFT’s.
Same hypers just moved to different technology.
In my circles it literally was the same people. Instead of trying to get me to buy ETH they started talking only via LLMs. Unsurprisingly we aren't in touch anymore... Maybe they are happier with their chatbots, I'll never know that's for sure
All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.
> All of the "carbon credit" guys I know are now all in on AI with zero sense of self awareness.
Some people made a lot of money off of those platforms. Everything was a nice story, but once you dug just a wee bit... smoke and mirrors.
There were definitely honest people trying to make a difference but they were unfortunately _vastly_ overshadowed by grifters.
Yep, 25 years ago it was the web. And remember the great electricity grift 100 years ago. And horseless carriage grifters like Ford!
See how fast so many of the crypto and NFT/Web 3 lot shifted to AI, like rats on a sinking ship.
I think VCs saw Crypto and dreamt of being able to create the same amount of irrational value. AI has the same technical complexity "You can't easily explain it in a single sentence" energy but unlike Crypto and NFTs, enough actual utility to not seem completely illegitimate. It literally is the perfect hype grift tool. Crypto has survived almost 20 years off of nonsense, how long can this crap last. sigh
If you still think crypto and AI are nonsense, then I guess you will carry these beliefs the rest of your life, but these beliefs won't outlive you, as they have no relation to reality.
I said AI has utility but drives irrational levels of investment. Crypto has little utility besides a place to gamble, con credulous people and otherwise act as a really shitty store of wealth.
Most modern crypto projects barely bother to promise to do anything useful let alone achieve anything useful, which the overwhelming majority do not.
These aren't beliefs but statements of fact.
Your knowledge and understanding of things is so limited and wrong that it's dumb even to discuss it with you. I will however serve the public interest by correcting some of your gross misinformation. Crypto encompasses stablecoins, commodity tokens, also countless other tokens representing stocks, and it facilitates immediate and permissionless transfer of funds, all of which go well above and beyond being a store of wealth.
Who is investing in NFTs today?
Who is building their company using permission-less blockchain as the database? The average person still uses a bank checking account, not replacing it with a crypto account.
I haven’t heard of any progress on tokens in the Governance direction.
Stablecoins without a public audit trail have so far stayed relevant, but there are several which are suspiciously reminiscent of the mistakes that SBF made.
We all see the transfer of funds and the ostensible store of wealth when it comes to buying influence or presidential pardons. Those of us not wearing crypto-colored glasses don’t see the promise that VCs sold us on the industry 5-10 years ago.
I never spoke about NFTs nor do I have to speak about them, not today and not ever, so save your bait. It's in the same way that you didn't speak about bank bailouts, so I won't bait you into it.
Most people obviously use multiple accounts of different types. Those who have crypto wallets will never reveal them to you in the interest of their privacy.
Stablecoin firms make so much cash via interest that they're easily over-capitalized.
If you're foolish enough to be manipulated by VC interests, that's your own fault. I would focus on the tech, not on what VCs want you to believe. This applies generally, irrespective of the sector. I don't know why this is hard to understand.
Ok. Well have fun. Bye.
> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation.
"Decades" is a stretch. There was a brief window around the Windows 7/8 era and then, like a dog returning to his vomit, they returned to their user-hostile bullshit. Windows 11 is the culmination of that, but Windows 10 was plenty bad. Remember how Windows 10 made Solitaire a subscription service? Sticking copilot into everything is just more of the same.
This feels like the modern version of 'Sent from my iPhone' but much more invasive. Git commits are legal and technical records. Falsifying who authored a piece of code just to pump up AI usage stats is a huge breach of trust and it is disappointing to see Microsoft prioritize branding over the integrity of the developer's log. I expect my IDE to record what happened, not what the marketing department wants people to think happened.....
Absolutely, messing with commits is more invasive than messages. It gets worse:
"Sent from my iPhone" appears in the authoring view, and you can delete it.
Co-authored-by: NEVER appears in the commit message UI - it is added without the user even seeing it.
Good point. That fake commit addendum means that the entire commit contents would not be under copyright protection. AI generated code is not currently copyrightable.
It doesn't mean that. A Co-Authored-By header isn't a legal signature or legal assertion of AI generated code.
It’s certainly an assertion.
Is thos actually decided yet? Closest thing was the image generation cases. What's your go to source for this?
Not that simple… this is great read: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/who-owns-the-claude-code-w...
One could argue that Co-Authored by Copilot means 'not under copyright'
Yeah the current guidance from US copyright office is that if it were said to be solely authored by copilot it would not be eligible for copyright. If it were said to be solely authored by human A (who happened to use co-pilot) the elements and arrangement of it not generated by co-pilot would be copyrightable. I’m not sure the copyright office has released guidance on attempting to register AI as a co-author I assume the registration would be rejected but you’d be able to re-submit as sole Human author.
To everyone who bought the "developer-friendly" Microsoft of VSCode fame from a few years ago: this is what they forever did, and forever will do.
This company has been pulling these tricks since the early 90s.
If you fell for this once again, there's nobody else to blame but yourself.
You may be surprised to learn some of the employed adults on this site were born after the 90’s.
The best part is that copilot commented on the PR saying that this doesn’t actually change the behaviour, creates inconsistency in the codebase and suggested reverting the change! (This comment seems to have been ignored…)
> The configuration schema default was changed to "all", but the runtime fallback in extensions/git/src/repository.ts still calls config.get('addAICoAuthor', 'off'). This is now out of sync and can lead to unexpected behavior in contexts where the contributed configuration defaults aren't loaded (e.g., some tests/hosts), and it makes the intended default unclear. Update the runtime fallback to match the schema default (or omit the fallback so the contributed default is used).
I also liked the bot posting screenshot diffs that are all false positives, while apparently not capturing the default change (is it not in some menu somewhere?)
That's pretty standard review practice in there by now.
FYI, they changed the default of 'git.addAICoAuthor' to 'chatAndAgent' afterwards: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/312880
So it was 'off' -> 'on' -> 'chatAndAgent'
This should be higher, as this dates from 5 days ago I wonder why OP didn't bother to mention this follow-up
"Sent from my iPhone" marketing only works if people want everyone to know they're using the product.
That's one way that it works, but that's not the main driver.
This kind of tagline marketing works best with people people who aren't even aware that they're participating, and who aren't bothered to do anything different it even if they become aware.
The juice isn't worth the squeeze, so the marketing remains.
But, also, I think in this case, it makes people less likely to use the product, as there's a lot of baggage around agent-written code. People who shouldn't be using it are using it to make so many PRs it's become a DoS attack for some projects, so a lot of project maintainers are rightly sniffy about AI-written code.
I'd like to think that the level of cognitive sophistication necessary to assess the situation negatively would be very widely available. That would be a very pleasant line of thought for me.
But then, I look at the modern-world empires that are built upon advertising and realize that reality just isn't that way. At all.
100% I have one ~tiny~ project that has a handful of stars and actual people seem to use it. End of last year I received a huge slop drive-by PR on it. Spent 20 minutes reading it, realised it was just nonsense. I want my friggin' 20 minutes back.
I can't imagine how infuriating this is for maintainers of projects with much more footfall. I'm frankly shocked more aren't just outright closing the doors to PRs from unknown contributors
Dang, now I wanna call Rusty n Edie's BBS for some reason.
It's the masochism of downloading images at 2400 baud.
However, there's one counterexample: some email clients in the past experienced explosive growth by adding signatures. It was annoying, but it definitely worked.
Someone, somewhere, probably has a "% of commits co-authored by copilot" KPI.
100% hundreds of people do.
Doubly so, because you are being used as ad-channel and not being compensated for it either.
Microsoft already does this with their mobile Outlook. Sent by Outlook Android / iOS on the bottom of the message.
Huge difference: the commit signature may not have had anything to do with Copilot, whereas email sent by mobile Outlook was... sent by Outlook.
But you can see it and remove it before sending. It’s definitely not the same.
Sometimes it randomly pushes without me asking, so I have a mess to clean up.
Does anybody else remember Tapatalk? They did the same with signatures in forums.
"sent from my iphone" originally meant more than just "i have a fancy phone that lets me send email" in the early days it meant "I'm not at my desk right now."
This is pumping someone's metrics up inside of Microsoft, somewhere.
The question is - will their boss revert it or encourage it when they discover the source of the stats being juiced?
A Principal Software Engineer at Microslop merged this - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitriy-vasyura-9191611/
This is the author of the MR - https://github.com/cwebster-99 - A Product Manager at Microslop
I've routinely spoken on the uselessness, and oftentimes detriment of product managers in tech.
The dearth of leadership driving for vanity metrics like PMs writing code doesn't help either.
The role feels like it’s borne out of a desire to see employees as fungible.
Isn't that someone the person who created the PR? "Product Manager at @microsoft working on VS Code and GitHub Copilot!" it says on her profile
Isn't it also cause they want to tag those commit so that they don't feed it into copilot training?
That someone saw Google's claim that 75% of their code is written with AI and said "hold my beer".
Juiced stats? No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.
>No such thing, at least as long as stock number go up.
You want your 401k to go up, don't you? /s
Microsoft is such a master class in how to make me hate you, quickly.
I know you didn’t mean it that way, but boy did that make me feel old.
Anyone else remember the bill gates borg category on slashdot?
Indeed fellow traveller. I do.
There is more of it that's going on. For me, Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard app sabotages the use of a competing search engine (DuckDuckGo) in Firefox in Android for me. When typing a multi-word double-quoted search phrase, it doesn't allow it to be typed correctly.
Isn’t this a kind of “leopards ate my face” situation? I thought we had all “agreed” that letting AI write code and take control of software repositories is good, even if we have no idea what is going on beyond a thin surface layer, because well it’s fast and we can fix it later and lol who needs testing? My customers are my testers.
And now it’s suddenly bad because the developer is the customer?
The sneaky commit modification is triggered by very modest usage of AI such as auto-completion.
Look, if an agent writes the code and the commit message then adding a Co-authored-by by default is ok. Not even showing it before the commit is made is not, and adding the message when AI was just completing code is not.
I genuinely think it's not ok even then. Copilot is a tool, one of many I use. That tool has no business polluting commit messages without my knowledge.
The appended message isn't even adding any new information, as in this day and age a vast majority of commits is probably "co-authored" by an LLM.
I should have been clearer, the hidden addition is never ok.
If I ask Claude to write a commit message, it will inserted a co-author line (and an ad), but I can see it and disapprove, add a counter instruction to CLAUDE.md etc
Glorified autocomplete, syntax reminder and random snippet generator thinks it's co-authoring things.
Next it will be Co-authored by Co-Pilot with help from Dominos Pizza
Next Microsoft will sue you to get a share of revenues and ownership as co-author, if your product ever makes success.
But only if you watched this 1 min Segment of today's sponsor...
Your free commit today is brought to you by duff beer
This will be so true hahaha
More like Carl's Jr.: Fuck you! We're eating.
My newest yocto image mounts a 640K RO tmpfs on top of $HOME/.vscode-server to prevent people using VSCode from shitting all over the relatively small emmc.
Can you explain how this works? Doesn’t this also stop you from connecting to it over ssh via vs code?
Search for "AICoauthor" in VSCode settings and turn it off.
To be precise,
"git.addAICoAuthor": "off"
Jeez, you can see many things wrong with this new all-in AI direction that Microsoft is taking. Commit by a product manager, who probably actually never digged through the code before…automated ai review not catching the problem, and the vibe codes pr introduction the error itself
This was merged by a Principal SWE though. Maybe overruled by leadership :)
Wonder if they're going to claim copyright interest based on inserting that crap.
Adding Copilot as co-author: For when just stealing other people's code doesn't cut it anymore.
Whenever I use Cursor's voice dictation, my prompts get "Thank you" inserted at the end of the sentence.
That happens in most speech to text systems, even Superwhisper, Monologue and Wispr Flow. I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio and happens when there is silence. I guess it depends on the model but most of them are based on Whisper which has this problem
> I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio
Does it also insert "please like & subscribe?"
"Smash that Like button."
Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.
It's all because of ridiculous performance systems of some $BIGTECH$
"Here's we increased number of commits by Copilot from X to Y, %Z increase"
Great, here’s how to remove it from your commits:
Run git commit --amend
Your text editor will open. Delete the line: Co-authored-by: Github Copilot <noreply@github.com>
Save and exit
Force push the change: git push --force-with-lease
Or people could instead not use Microslop software, easy fix for the AI bullshit. But yeah of course you're technically right.
I like your solution better.
Looks like it comes into play for telemetry and here in actual commits:
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/4e312e3c3a18d13c26d...
This is really bad.
Should be the top comment for succintly summarizing the situation.
At no point in time companies were so desperate for developer attention. It feels like the general consensus is it is a “winner takes it all” race, and everyone has to add as many dark patterns as possible to increase stickiness.
Time to leave for something else if you haven't already, vscode has been good to us but this kind of behavior is only going to ramp up as Microsoft seeks to get a return on their AI investments.
Just when you think they've reached the bottom, they just keep digging.
Does that make the code uncopyrightable? Non-human authorship?
If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright.
And of course dumb messages that aren't true won't affect copyright.
> If it's actually co authored then you should be fine on copyright
How so? All your outoutput is now legally partly owned by Microsoft?
The courts have determined that, yes, and that is the position of the Copyright Office. And the Supreme Court has rejected appeal, so that's the standing precedent.
Realistically, look forward to SOX style audits and having to maintain evidence of how much of a code base has human authorship vs machine generation. Or reject slop.
I can't wait for:
* The first company to do perjury for litigating over a nonexistent copyright for machine generated code.
* The first company to get nailed to the wall for reverse engineering and replicating high profile copyrighted code, like Windows.
Having a tool involved isn't the same as being entirely generated by a tool
For example, without any AI, if I generate a lookup table for the sine function in my code, that table may not be copyrightable because it was machine-generated, but it doesn't somehow make the rest of the code not copyrightable either
"Co-authored by" doesn't imply it was entirely machine-generated
The real question is why Anthropic was able to use DMCA takedown requests "in good faith" against the Claude leaks when their own CTO claimed it is a 100% slopcoded codebase, and they themselves argue that all LLM generated code is transformed enough to not be copyrightable. Which they have to state without being able to turn back because they violated millions of book and software licenses during training.
Make it make sense.
Truth, law and consequences (for the capital class) are so last year.
Is this when you add a commit through VSC or does the editor add some git hook?
A lot of bitching about Microsoft here, for something Claude has been doing forever. I have a git hook that rejects any commit containing the line Co-authored by Claude
That's a fair point, but claude code is not an editor (yet?), and when you use claude code, and allow it to commit things, it's almost certainly "co-authored by llm".
Back to vscode, people get the "co-authored" line even if they didn't use the AI features.
Well claude does it if you ask it to commit instead of you, and it lets you review it, this is not the case with this feature - judging by the comments on PR. Sometimes it says co-authored by copilot even when the code is not generated by AI. Also it will never say co-authored by claude or whatever, always copilot. Also why would my IDE care about this and not the AI itself?
Are you ashamed of other people finding out you used Claude? I think the co-authored-by bit should not be a setting at all, AI-generated code should be clearly identified.
> AI-generated code should be clearly identified.
Let AI autonomously produce code of a quality that I care about and I might consider giving it credit. I don't know how other people write code but I come up with an idea and use a multitude of LLMs to brainstorm a reasonably comprehensive spec that any reasonably competent person can read and produce a working program from, including a locally working Q2 quant of Qwen 3.6. Even Kimi is as good as Claude at most coding tasks, and I don't see why any single agent deserves any credit for my design.
Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.
> Let artists and filmmakers start watermarking their output with the tools they use and I might reconsider my decision.
They do, though, in the form of metadata.
Do Adobe or Arri or Red get authorship credit for the work their hardware and software do on projects? After all, artists would not be able to produce a single pixel without them. In a similar vein, you could make the argument that modern farming is sitting on your ass in your modern tractor while software handles most of the work. Does John Deere get rights over a quarter/half your harvest?
I am stuck between the luddites and "artisanal" coders on this one. LLMs are neither as smart/useful or as dumb/useless as people think. Unless your job involves producing useless garbage every single day, good software requires a lot of thought before the first line of code is even written. For those with serious domain knowledge, the thinking time can be compressed into minutes/hours rather than days/weeks it might take.
LLMs are a tool. You either pay for it or you use the freely available ones on your own hardware. As long as the output is directed by my thinking, the output belongs to me. If it were up to me, I would abolish IPR (and even permanent ownership of land) as a category altogether, but that is a different discussion.
Basically what you’re saying is that if AI does anything on your computer, anything the AI impacts you should lose control over. If the AI touched it at all in any way, big or small, you now lose ownership of the actions your computer takes (on open source tools, I might add).
In case you need reminding of common sense, I’m supposed to be allowed to decide what my commit messages are because it’s my fucking computer.
I prefer that my software is not a morality police.
I think the Linux kernel's standard of disclosure via the "Assisted-By" trailer is the right move.
Makes it clear you used a bullshit machine, without implying it's an author.
...assuming you think using them at all is a good move - I won't deny they have some utility (though I'd argue much lower than many seem to think), but I do presently believe they're a disaster for humanity.
The ruination of the Internet with slop, the massive propagation of propaganda, and the insanely easy-to-wield tools for abuse are in no way worth the ability to accrue tech debt at 10x velocity (though to be clear, accruing tech debt can absolutely be a useful strategy, if one I personally dislike).
mind-boggling people are trying to hide this, tells you all you need to know about our “profession.” presence of that hook or the like in a place of business should be fireable offense
I've never had Claude Code in VSCode add attribution to a commit when I didn't use it. VSCode is adding the attribution even when you have all copilot features disabled and therefore could not have used it.
Please do share
Ask claude to “Write a hook for Claude code that rejects any get commit that includes “co-authored by Claude” in it”
Just ask Claude to write it..
Default or mandatory gift authorship?
So GitHub reached its tipping point, I guess vscode will follow
I personally don't mind if an AI inserts it's "Co-Authored by" tag into commits it has worked on - it's transparency, I used its help and it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad.
But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.
> it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad
Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.
Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.
I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?
DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?
I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?
It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.
It's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)
GCC isn't making editorial decisions.
The LLM is just a database. Would you be fine if this was done when cribbing stuff from Github, StackOverflow, tutorials and so on, or do you think some databases are more special than others in this regard, and if so, on what merit?
I regularly link comments in my code pointing to the source of the code I have "cribbed"
It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.
> No description provided.
Right because of course you wouldn’t provide an explanation for why such a change would be made.
Providing zero description or background or explanation for why a change is made is probably the only thing that pisses me off as much as a pure AI-slop description of a change: your job in a PR description is to give the background for why a change is being made. Honestly, any PR which doesn’t do this should be insta-closed by policy. But it totally tracks with the level of quality I’d expect from the company in question.
Having to scroll through 3 screens worth of giant automated comments on the linked PR before seeing any comments written by humans is the cherry on top.
So many repositories look like this now, it's honestly sad.
This is not just a joke, it is a legal nightmare. You may be giving away the copyright ownership, or at least part of it, to Microsoft.
AI generated code is not copyrightable anyway. The only real question is how much "copiloting" you have to get ownership, and right now the courts seem to be heading towards it not mattering if AI was involved
I got tired of Claude adding their signatures to my commits against my instructions (the settings schema changed at some point), so I added a commit-msg hook that blocks multi-line commits. Easy and works like a charm, and would block this sort of M$ intrusion.
What a despicable behaviour from M$.
I saw this the other day and was pretty confused - I prefer to write my own commit messages and wondered if I’d accidentally let the AI do it this time. Nope, just MS changing things behind my back. Sigh.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958353
Finally the usage metrics look amazing, the masses have woken up
The day I see it does this is the day I switch to zed, or whatever.
Speaking of which, why does anybody use VS Code?
https://vscodium.com/
I do at work because nobody listens to me, but at home never ever have I used VS Code. Use just Codium.
Wasn’t it discussed here that no copyrights apply to code generated by AI? I’m asking myself whether adding "Co-authored-by: Copilot" means the code is not protected by the GPL, or even allows Microsoft to own your code...
Claude code and codex do this all the time too. Fucking annoying.
There's a large gap between what they do (same env var disables this since the beginning) vs Microsoft bucking it's way through AI coauthorship credit in a multi potential author china shop, though.
Well, that's good news for all the developers working at companies with delusional management proclaiming "100% of code will be written by AI in 6 months"!
Growth hacking at its best /s
"chat.disableAIFeatures": true
I really hope the editor wars don't start again. I've been happily using VsCode for years now. More than happy in fact, it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used, as evidenced by how AI companies basically started as a VsCode fork.
But this is going full-throttle on enshittification.
WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?
The editor wars never ended, and VSCode has been user hostile since inception. It came with unavoidable telemetry right out the gate.
vim and emacs are both still great choices.
I've been using *nix and usenet since the early 1990's.
I always thought "editor wars" was a particularly dumb in-joke among a small group and I feel sad when I see people who think it was ever more than that.
The Wikipedia page cites "The Jargon File" as an authoritative source of truth. Ridiculous.
> WTF happened at microsoft (github, openai partnership, copilot pricing) that all this shit just ramped up to a 11?
"Make a great free product so that we can enshittify it later" is an infamous MS playbook. Maybe nothing happened, maybe just the usual MS at work.
If you're angry about this then what are you going to do about it?
Make sure to delete VSCode fully from any PC I have access to and annoy all my coworkers to get rid of it.
Moved to Zed and recommended my team do the same.
Turn it off and rage on social media.
If it gets bad enough, look into Zed. Their tagline is literally "your last next editor".
Zed currently does not have a revenue stream. Ot's only a matter of time before the same shenanigans ensue.
They're a commercial entity that sells AI plans and enterprise features.
Honestly not sure how viable that is long term with the way the pricing kinda needs to go. I think the recent copilot price increase is just the tip of the iceberg.
Like how GNU Emacs is completely saturated with AI now?
(That's sarcasm, in case anyone wants to pretend I'm being serious.)
Emacs is not VC-backed.
...yet.
..kidding. Obviously.
Unfortunately, Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish, Microsoft supported LSPs just work better in VSCode, they are better integrated, and Zed can't do anything about LSPs memory or peformance.
> Zed is years behind VSCode in terms of polish
One could think that. But VSCode is the one that occasionally failed to simply render text.
No idea what happened these handful of times, but the UI was just completely screwed up, as if it were one of these "scratch to reveal" games, but with the file’s content (and unresponsive, obviously).
I'm rooting for Zed but it does feel quite underbaked still right now.