Microsoft removes Copilot co-author tag

Git commit metadata sounds small, but it is basically the receipt attached to a code change. Who wrote this? What tool touched it? Can your team trust the history later? That is why Microsoft had to move quickly after VS Code 1.118 started appending a `Co-authored-by: Copilot` line to some commits that users say had nothing to do with Copilot. Within days, the company backed the behavior out in VS Code 1.119. (code.visualstudio.com) ### What actually went wrong? The short version is that VS Code started treating more edits as Copilot-assisted than it should have. Microsoft’s own explanation says there was a bug that “attributed non-Copilot code completions to Copilot,” which then caused commit messages to include `Co-authored-by: Copilot <copilot@github.com>`. That is the key detail — th(code.visualstudio.com)nto Git history. (github.com) ### Why did developers care so much? Because commit trailers are not decoration. Teams use them for authorship, audits, compliance, code review norms, and plain old social trust. If a tool silently adds an AI co-author line, it can imply assistance that never happened. And once that line lands in a pushed commit, cleaning it up is annoying at best and history-rewri(github.com)efault.” It touches provenance. (github.com) ### Was this only happening when Copilot was on? Turns out, no — and that is what made the backlash sharper. Microsoft said the bug could add the Copilot co-author line even when the `disableAIfeatures` setting was enabled. That matters because a user who explicitly turned AI features off could still end up with AI attribution in commits. For developers, that reads(github.com)ine it was told not to cross. (github.com) ### What did Microsoft change? Microsoft says it changed the setting value in 1.118 during the public rollout that started on April 29, 2026, then removed the problematic behavior in 1.119, released on May 6, 2026. The 1.119 release notes do not spotlight the reversal as a headline feature, but the GitHub issue serves as the real explanation page for what happened and why it was undone. (code.visualstudio.com) ### Why does the release timing matter? Because this was not some months-long slow burn. The public rollout started on April 29, and Microsoft posted the fix update a few days later. That tells you two things. First, users noticed immediately. Second, the company judged the trust cost as high enough to reverse course fast instead of defending the design. In d(code.visualstudio.com)t quickly, the social contract around it was weaker than the product team expected. (github.com) ### Is the bigger issue just “AI in the editor”? Not really. Most developers already know Copilot can suggest code and even help generate commit messages inside VS Code. The real issue is consent and attribution boundaries. People will tolerate aggressive automation if they can see it, control it, and trust the labels. But if the tool starts writing provenance on t(github.com)roductivity to authorship. (code.visualstudio.com) ### So what is the lesson here? AI features in coding tools are no longer just “helpful suggestions.” They are starting to modify the record around how code got made. That makes defaults much more sensitive. A bad autocomplete is forgettable. A bad authorship tag is sticky. Microsoft fixed this one quickly, but the episode is a clean reminder that in developer tooling, metadata is product behavior — not a footnote. (code.visualstudio.com)