I am no longer letting Claude Code add itself as Co-author in my commits

ddhanush about 2 hours ago 6 commentsRead Article on igupta.in

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Discussion (6 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

theokrueger•about 1 hour ago

im concerned it ever caught on at all. not only is it free advertising that devalues your work in the eyes of some, but also indicates you let a harness write to git in the first place

OJFord•about 1 hour ago

No it doesn't? I've written commit messages ending with 'Co-authored-by [Claude]' a few times, in acknowledgement that it was largely 'vibed' and I only reviewed and committed it. I've never had Claude Code run `git commit`.

verdverm•about 1 hour ago

the models now commit because they think it is what we want, they are "relentlessly proactive" as simonw puts it, I now have to have instructions so they do not commit and push

wyum•about 1 hour ago

I'm not sure who did it first (CoPilot maybe?), but for me it was Claude Code that started putting its name on everything.

Advertising seems like the main reason, and maybe trying to over-anthropomorphize the tools.

puelocesar•about 1 hour ago

Therefore it’s only fair that some kind of disclaimer is shown somewhere

gruez•about 1 hour ago

I agree about the aspect about shirking responsibility, but...

>A few years ago I’d never have added Google or StackOverflow as co-authors.

That's not as good of an argument as you think. If you copied entire functions or files wholesale, it would be fair to attribute that, even if you "reviewed" it.

dhanush•about 1 hour ago

Hi, author here. Yes, I agree and that's precisely what I wrote in the post:

> A few years ago I’d never have added Google or StackOverflow as co-authors. But I would have added a link to post that helped and I’ll continue to do so now.

gruez•38 minutes ago

Right, but how would that work with claude? Do you just add "written by claude" in the commit message? Add "written by claude" in the file header (like a copyright notice)? If you're doing either, is there really any difference between that and the standard "co-authored-by: claude" trailer? Is the whole debate over what "co-authored" means and/or how it shows up on github?

dhanush•17 minutes ago

Yeah, my thought here is more towards what co-authored should mean and what ownership it implies. I think presence of an AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md is a good signal that I'm using this tool for this project and maybe don't need to repeat it for every commit that I make.

My personal feeling so far is, seeing claude code as co-author in my commits inevitably makes me not pay as much attention to the commit. And removing that forces me to really recognize that, hey this is my work. And I'd better make sure this is of the same quality that I would do otherwise. Kind of like a psychological hack maybe? But it seems to work better.

Overall, this is just a series of steps I'm taking to maintain my agency in my work.

wyum•about 1 hour ago

Attribution as a "source" I would agree, and I used to put stack overflow links in my docstrings/comments for reference.

But I would not ever call the StackOverflow user a "co-author" on my commits.

I think that distinction matters.

bdangubic•about 1 hour ago

we once fired a guy for not including link/attrbution to copy/paste SO function

mtklein•about 1 hour ago

I should barely be listed as a co-author on what Claude does for me. Hiding Claude's contribution feels about as true as a combover to me.

coldblues•about 1 hour ago

The author is making up a pretext to hide their use of LLMs.

dhanush•about 1 hour ago

Hi, author here. On the contrary I'm trying to go in a direction where AI usage is declared as a disclaimer in the project's README or similar. For work, it doesn't really matter because everyone's doing it and your usage stats are visible by admins. Here's what I wrote in the closing sentences in the post:

> What about attributions and disclaimers for AI generated work? If you’re concerned being transparent to anyone seeing your work, either create an AI specific account that commits with your name or add a big disclaimer to your project’s readme that this is AI slop and there be dragons.

Hope that helps clarify my stance. :)

g-b-r•11 minutes ago

Why an AI specific account?

It makes it a lot harder to notice how much you're using LLMs, for what gain?

> If you’re concerned being transparent to anyone

Since heavy LLM users are unlikely to have that concern, let's just maintain this default.

I imagine you'd like agents to stop signing commits unless asked to, but that would make even actual vibe coding a lot harder to detect.

puelocesar•about 1 hour ago

> you have to use it at work unless you want to go out the door

Why people are so compelled to gospel about their saviors to others? Why tech became a cult?

gruez•about 1 hour ago

Did you read the subsequent sentence?

>Side projects is completely upto you

That hardly strikes me as "gospel about their saviors" to me. Not to mention at least in my circles that statement is approximately true, even at a company that hasn't gone full AI-crazy (eg. with unlimited token spend and AI use leaderboards).

estetlinus•about 1 hour ago

I think it happened when it solved one of those Erdős problems, while also knowing everything there is to know about birds, mitochondria, history of Uganda, etc.

Even my most contrarian friends have a hard time justifying coding by hand. To say it slopaganda style; That’s not a cult, that’s common sense.

g-b-r•about 1 hour ago

How about all the times it confidently states made up stuff, and writes horribly insecure code?

That's not common sense, that's bs.

gruez•32 minutes ago

Everything you described applies to human written code, especially ones you're randomly copy pasting from the internet. Maybe if the stackoverflow answer you're copying from is popular enough that people will catch it, but otherwise you'd probably have better luck asking AI to review it.