VS Code turns on Copilot signature by default: "Co-Authored-by" is automatically added to each git submission

Core conclusion

On May 3, 2026, a VS Code PR detonated the community in Hacker News: Microsoft changed a setting called addAICoAuthor from the default off ("default": "off") to the default on ("default": "on"), causing VS Code to automatically insert the Co-Authored-by: Copilot signature in all git submissions - even if the user does not use Copilot to generate any code at all.

This PR only involved the modification of 2 lines of code, but it received 209+ comments and 310👎reactions. The community response was extremely intense.

Key Points

• Incident time: 2026-05-03 (PR merged 2 weeks ago, broke out in HN today)
• Scope of influence: All developers using VS Code + GitHub Copilot
• Core change: git config addAICoAuthor changed from off to on, and this configuration is extremely difficult to find in the VS Code settings UI
• Fix: Search for addAICoAuthor in VS Code settings and close it manually

Background and trigger events

The Microsoft VS Code team merged PR #310226 2 weeks ago and modified a line of configuration in extensions/git/package.json: changing the default value of the addAICoAuthor setting from "off" to "on".

The PR submitter cwebster-99 did not even provide any description text ("No description provided."), only the cold title "Enabling ai co author by default". The PR was reviewed and merged by dmitrivMS into a regular update 2 weeks ago.

Today (May 3), developer indrora posted on Hacker News to expose this matter. In less than 3 hours, he received 459 points and ranked first on the homepage. Community comments generally believe that this is Microsoft's behavior of "secretly implanting Copilot ads in git history".

Key Impact

Adaptation suggestions

For content creators and developers using VS Code, we recommend doing the following immediately:

1. Turn off automatic signature

Search for addAICoAuthor in the VS Code settings (Cmd + ,) and set the value to off:

{
  "git.addAICoAuthor": "off"
}

2.

git Copilot

git log --grep="Co-Authored-by: Copilot"

， git rebase -i git filter-branch 。

3. git hook

pre-commit hook Copilot

# !/bin/sh
if grep -q "Co-Authored-by: Copilot" "$1"; then
 echo " Copilot "
  sed -i '/Co-Authored-by: Copilot/d' "$1"
fi

• VS Code addAICoAuthor
• commit
• [ ]
• [ ]

HN

1. 「」 rsynnott "AI 。、、，——' AI'。"

2. 「」 storus "——，。"

**3. ** ""AI 。 Copilot Chat、Inline Suggestions 。""，，。

AI ，GitHub Copilot、VS Code

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