Microsoft is reversing course on a Visual Studio Code change that quietly tagged Git commits with a 'Co-Authored-by: Copilot' trailer — even on installations where developers had explicitly turned AI features off. The publisher of VS Code says the default will be reverted in the next release after a wave of backlash on GitHub and Hacker News.
The change shipped in VS Code 1.118 on April 29 via pull request #310226, which flipped the git.addAICoAuthor setting from off to active by default. From that point on, the editor's Git extension would automatically append a Copilot co-author trailer to commit messages whenever it detected AI-assisted changes, with no opt-in step required.
Trailer attached even with AI disabled
The firestorm started when developers noticed the trailer attaching to commits where Copilot had not, in fact, contributed code. Reports filed under issue #313064 in the microsoft/vscode repository show users seeing the line in commits made on installs with chat.disableAIFeatures set to true — the configuration that is supposed to fully turn off AI in the editor.
For open source maintainers, the implications were immediate. A Copilot co-author tag implicates licensing and provenance, and many projects have explicit rules about whether AI-assisted contributions are allowed at all. Several maintainers complained that the trailer was effectively rewriting the authorship record of work they had done without any AI in the loop.
Microsoft's response
Dmitriy Vasyura, the Microsoft principal engineer who merged the change, took responsibility in the aftermath. According to The Decoder, which broke the story on May 3, Vasyura said the feature 'should never have run with AI features disabled' and that commits should not have been tagged as AI-generated when no AI was involved. He committed to reverting the default setting in version 1.119, opening pull request #313931 to flip git.addAICoAuthor back to off.
The rollout process drew its own criticism. Community comments described the pull request being merged the day after it opened, with no written description and only a single approving review. The accompanying GitHub Discussion #194075, where users had raised similar concerns earlier, was reportedly locked as spam, further inflaming the response.
What developers can do today
Until 1.119 ships, users can restore the prior behavior by setting git.addAICoAuthor to off in user or workspace settings. The setting also accepts chatAndAgent, which limits the trailer to commits containing code generated through Copilot Chat or agent mode, and all, the value 1.118 used by default, which extends the trailer to inline completions.
The episode is a reminder of how much trust developers place in their editor's defaults. A single one-line setting flip — shipped without a clear opt-in path and with detection logic that misfired — was enough to attach Microsoft's AI brand to the commit history of users who had explicitly opted out. Reverting the default fixes the immediate problem, but the broader question of how AI co-authorship should be recorded in source control is unlikely to go away.
