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by lifis 16 days ago
Huh? It's not advertising, it's disclosure that the code was not fully (or at all) written by you.
3 comments

it absolutely is advertising, you can even call it a growth hack if you want to feel good about it

co-authorship implies ability to hold author rights, which afaik an algorithm can't do.

are folks adding speakeasy/stainless co-authorship lines to their commits? should i add alembic as a co-author after making some changes to the database schema?

  Co-authored-by: buf generate <noreply@github.com>
That's exactly what you're supposed to do - if a tool generated the code in a commit, you should be using a commit trailer for that. Whether that's uniffi, an rpc preprocessor, dependabot or renovate, or some AI tool.
> That's exactly what you're supposed to do

this does not seem to match reality, see:

  1. count for claude as co-author: 25M
  2. count for speakeasy as co-author: 917
  3. count for stainless as co-author: 6.2k
  4. count for alembic as co-author: *Your search did not match any commits*
ex. search: https://github.com/search?q=%22Co-Authored-By%3A+Claude%22+%...
As the sibling notes, that would usually be marked as Generated-By or Generator or similar tags. Claude is only using "Co-Authored-By" for the same reason that Anthropic is calling claude "he", not "it": to anthropomorphize the machine in the public's perception.
There's a Generated-by trailer for that sort of thing.
If co-authorship implies holding rights, then what gives the "primary author" who just prompted for the code the right to add their own name?
the fact they authored the code?

assume no deep learning, of any kind is involved: you write a program, you are the author, right? you compile the code, are you still the author? do you have to attribute co-authorship to gcc/llvm/oracle?

i think not, you are still the author, same as when anyone else uses an llm to write code.

ianal

It’s both
> Sent from my iPhone.

I agree. It's both an ad and a useful signal of where the code came from or how it was created.

Just like the default iPhone email signature, it's an ad and a hint that the author was typing with their thumbs, so it's probably a brief auto-corrected message for that reason.

The iPhone analogy is very apt and accurate: it's ~95% advertising and ~5% useful signal.

Which for my repositories means I want ~95% less of it in my commit history. I'm prepared to round up for simplicity. But to each their own.

You could do that without naming the AI product.