Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a text editor for computer programming. In versions 1.117 and 1.118, if you use any autocomplete, including tab complete, it marks your code commit with “Co-authored by Copilot”! Even if you don’t use Copilot. Even if you’ve got “chat.disableAIFeatures” switched on: [GitHub]
The most concerning part is that I had already checked the commit message before committing. I deleted Copilot’s generated English commit message and manually wrote my own commit message instead. However, after the commit was created, the final Git history still contained the Copilot co-author line.
This hit the top of Hacker News on Saturday. Dmitriy Vasyura, a Principal Software Engineer on VS Code, posted apologising for the change: [Hacker News]
I am the person who approved this PR and would like to acknowledge and apologize for the mistake of turning this feature on by default without sufficient upfront validation
… Obviously, it should not be on when disableAIFeatures is on and it should not be reporting changes that were not done by AI. I’ll work on fixing those and meanwhile revert default to off in 1.119 update.
Didn’t Microsoft do any testing before they put this live? Sure they did, and they spotted this problem! But they went ahead and released it anyway: [Hacker News]
We did catch it internally in testing (as we use VS Code for all our work, so some folks did stumble on it), but I think we underestimated the impact and should do a better job at that.
Vasyura pushed a fix Sunday morning, and VS Code will stop doing this in version 1.119, which should be up tomorrow. [GitHub]
Three weeks ago, a product manager, Courtney Webster, decided it would be a great feature to switch on these messages by default. So Webster vibe-coded the change! [GitHub]
A Copilot bot reviewed the change, then Vasyura pushed the manager vibe code to production. What developer in 2026 is going to reject their manager’s code?
Webster has a pile of code commits on GitHub. As far as I can tell, they’re almost all vibe coded with Copilot. [GitHub]
This isn’t about business, profit, or shareholder value. It’s about internal politics — the product manager needs you to notice their feature.
This is the future that Microsoft is promising your boss — your manager can fill the software with buggy promotional vibe code themselves. And none of those annoying developers to push back. AI will bring us the great boss ideas utopia!
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