DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
60% Positive
Analyzed from 3969 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#claude#don#commit#session#code#attribution#default#anthropic#copyright#used
Discussion (124 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I still get to control whether other people can see the session, but I don’t lose it.
I don’t get the “unprofessional” argument. This is attribution. Attribution is professional. If you don’t want it, you turn it off or rewrite the commit messages. If you are having Claude write the commit messages FOR YOU and you are NOT READING THEM then that’s what’s unprofessional. I am honestly kind of shocked and disappointed by how upset people are by this.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1091231/
Which is actually why I DON'T like the session amended. Ultimately it is an ad placed into the Git log, and noise at that. Regardless of if it exists or not, the professional responsibility for what is contained in that PR/commit falls to the feet of the developer contributing it.
Microsoft previously did this with Copilot, which was correctly met with a very negative response. I don't see why an ad by Anthropic is better than an ad from Microsoft.
I presume this is Anthropic trying to their "usage" stats before their IPO.
Keep in mind that if you run across someone else's spam in the Git logs:
- You need a Claude account.
- You need permission to view the session.
The only people who can just follow that link and look at how Claude was used, is Anthropic themselves. Therefore, they can also use it as an additional mechanism to tie sessions back to other IDs/identities. For everyone else this is "Sent from an iPhone" but longer.
Models change so much that I don't really see why anybody cares what model was used to generate the code after the fact. It changes every few months and they're non-deterministic so its not like you'll ever "recreate" the same conversation yourself anyways.
The specific model used can't be important because theres a new trending one every couple weeks nowadays. The conversation could be wildly out there and have 10+ different iterations of the same thing in it that led to the final product, etc.
It's not like before AI we were asking people to explain every single iteration they went through in their commit body, or to see their entire internal dialogue.
I don't really understand people's hype around needing to see the conversation they had with their AI. As long as the code itself is self-documented and final decisions are relatively well-documented future agents and humans will pick up on it much faster than reading the entire transcripts anyways.
That's not even bringing into the fact that there are people who use multiple models, multiple sessions, multiple harnesses across the same commits/changesets. How do you reconcile those alongside people who could have made human changes in the end?
Sometimes I tell Claude ‘don’t trust file X, it was written by a colleague who writes awful tests’. I don’t want that in my commit messages.
Also I frequently use an LLM to commit work that I have written. It is just misleading in that case.
In general I assume that attribution to AI is approximate. People copy-paste things out of chats and those don’t get attributed to the AI. And on the flip side, I’ve had AI write a commit, and then I’ve reverted it and written something different by hand (and it got tagged with an LLM session).
The AI attribution is approximate and informative. The commit message and authorship are the more important parts.
You may be concerned that people will think your commits are LLM-generated. I’m sorry that you have to work in that environment, but I don’t work in an environment like that and I don’t share your concerns.
I think some folks think that using an LLM is a shameful act and this is somehow shaming it and others believe that it ties back to the conversation. These conversations don't have any guarantee of being accessible over the long haul. If there was value in the conversation, the conversation should be somehow captured as well, not just some URLs.
I don’t think anyone will find it valuable and I don’t want anyone to read it
I don't understand why it isn't opt-in. Or at least a heads-up somewhere.
"Of course they were intentional in adding in an ad to everyone's git log" honestly night be the less cynical take, because the alternative is assuming that they actually look at git logs ever rather than only having Claude deal with it.
It's also, like, kind of the point of using git, isn't it? So putting this in the commit message feels very appropriate to me.
https://openspec.dev/
But I do see the value in seeing the conversation that lead to the spec. I make sure that all product decisions go through me prior to the agent writing the spec and the questions I ask and decisions I make could definitely help understand retroactively why something is the way it is.
I guess with the default openspec schema you wouldn't have that but you could customize it or create your own in which the reasoning is encoded fully.
Attribution is indeed professional. If you use an AI to write the code for you and have no idea why you accepted the decisions it made nor can you explain them to another human, that would be clear evidence of acute skill atrophy.
Post IPO, many years down the line, a leadership that is eager to cut costs will look at their storage usage and expire 7 year old non-training sessions. Quickest thing to go. I have zero faith in any successful provider getting this right.
Git is supposed to be the durable storage medium, self containing and weathering the passage of time. Now we're littering the repos with a bunch of URLs that are only helpful in the short term.
I'm not embarrassed by my LLM usage and I want to provide a full audit trail whenever possible to aid myself in the future.
PS: Claude archives old conversations on your computer after 30days. I've started archiving mine to the side as well for potential future use.
I use many tools to develop software and if my IDE would silently start adding "This commit was created with IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate" I'd find it intrusive and obnoxious, too.
Knowing which model created the code has more "weight" to it than the editor IMHO which is why I think this is different. Adding the session link is a nice touch.
Allowing tools to insert themselves into the git history only makes sense if you are purely vibecoding with a single model and don't even bother to check and clean it up anymore. Is this truly the default state of software development already? How the times have changed.
The sessions are definitely more useful but only if I'm using a single agent from a single provider.
Archives? Or deletes?
I think its the beginning of a larger trend where Anthropic makes its infeasible to use Claude without Claude getting credit. Not for ethical reasons, but business reasons. Fingerprinting supports this as well.
Im speculating. And these are little things that are reasonable by itself. They are ethical. But I dont think Anthropic wants Claude to ultimately be a tool that produces some output that just gets integrated into some human’s work product. IE they dont care much about authors utilizing Claude for writing their papers or books. They do care about Claude becoming the most prolific published author by orders of magnitude. And not being “plagiarized.”
We shouldn't polute commit messages with these kind of extra's, they will only lead to more noise. Once all the models append random urls to commit messages, who's to trust these?
If you need attribution I bet that you can find a neater way to tie commit shas to claude uuids.
I still have to use Claude Code at work and after getting used to Pi I feel I'm always fighting against it.
Maybe the way I enjoy working with LLMs just works better with Pi.
Again, if you challenge it “It came from my harness instructions” and obviously telling it not to in memory is about as successful as… any other instruction in memory, about 60% of the time.
full private repo including session transcripts, etc. agent attribution etc, with public repo that only shows selected subset without sessions ids, some or all agents, etc.
alternatively, we sometimes also do a separate chat only repo or server etc if cross-team agent chat access worth it and don't bother with private / public just disable agents in code repo
have also done some other variants etc. bit of pain to init config, does help with reducing the agent clutter, improve chat security boundaries in case any keys or sensitive env were in any chats if PII / sensitive data checker miss etc.
However, I think claude code needs better change management. It changes quite frequent and I think changes like these should be communicated better in software. (Like a card game may show card changes in game when a patch happened.) It may impact how I do things when creating the commit messages or PRs.
> That is a stupid and evil feature.
I can see arguments for "stupid", but "evil"?
They probably were thinking about how that serves them as an ad, not about transparency, but still.
I say they should go one step further and somehow make it harder/inconvenient to turn it off (big tech is good at this already, so...); or, maybe, hide that option behind extra feature under premium subscription or something.
P.S. The comments are pure gold. They don't like they can't fake authorship and have the audacity to be indignant!
It might come with advertising benefits for them but expect it’s mostly just because it helps their tools work and that benefits everyone.
I don't need "Created by Claude Code 1.2.3, Opus 4.8 inside tmux inside ghostty on macOS ## on Mac Book Pro 2019 by git 123 in /Users/nijave/repo"
If you want session context, commit the session or prompt or add a git note. I think opaque URIs are the wrong approach unless they're to an issue tracker with more details. Proprietary URIs are not easily usable and interoperable with other tools. Commited information should still be valid and useful in 10 years.
I'm also not sure session is the right level of abstraction. I recently setup Claude Code with subscription delegation to opencode harness with z.ai coding plans and opencode go coding plan and it's been working fairly but there is no singular "session"
There absolutely should be a fool proof undefeatable mechanism that identifies or watermarks code that was completely LLM generated.
If you use LLMs, own it.
Hard boundaries there simply don't exist for most workflows, and I suspect if they did, it'd be at the expense of things ~nobody would want to give up.
On one hand I guess it is fine to automatically tag that the commit was AI-generated. On the other hand, this will happen even if you audit every line and add your own changes too, which means the attribution is misleading.
Anyone thinking this is about tagging AI generated changes and not just making the experience in Claude better is missing the point of the feature.
- Having the feature available seems good.
- Having the feature default on is debatable, but not outside the realm of possibility.
- Having the feature default on, without any kind of release notes that say that it happens and link to the option to disable it is clownshoes "bring back the ghost of Steve Jobs to yell at the product team" type behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud
AI does not enjoy copyright protection. Pretending you created something written by AI is copyfraud.
Does this mean a company can take code from an open source project that used AI, put it into their closed source code, potentially modify it, all without attribution?
Which court has made a ruling on this? The only decision I'm aware of was that some Gen-AI artwork couldn't be copyrightable if it was made without substantial input, direction, and scrutiny.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922
You did not write it, the AI did. Either the work cannot be copyright, or the AI owner (Anthropic) owns the code. Not you. In no case can you own code you didn't write. You guys keep arguing that it enjoys copyright protection without realizing this part. There is no "work-for-hire" default in the law for AI even if it did enjoy copyright. You don't own it. And I am pointing out neither should Anthropic.
(I would also argue whether it matters in practice the other way: if something was AI generated, it is in principle cheap for someone else to generate it separately anyway: if you're wanting to copy AI generated code then there's probably some part of the ideas in it that are valuable beyond what the AI can output on its own)
(Also, this uncertainty does still mean that it's probably prudent to record which parts of your software are generated and which are not: it's a conceivable outcome that some company winds up in court and manages to argue that the human-generated parts are still covered under copyright, but are unable to point to which parts those are and therefore lose it entirely)
1: https://x.com/m_herrmann/status/2092579839676948495