🏷️ Discussion Type
Product Feedback
💬 Feature/Topic Area
VS Code
Body
I want to report a serious issue with GitHub Copilot’s commit message generation workflow.
GitHub Copilot inserted the following line into my Git commit message:
Co-authored-by: Copilot copilot@github.com
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 means the message I reviewed before committing was not the final content that ended up in Git history, or Copilot/VS Code added co-author metadata after my manual edit. That is unacceptable in a professional development workflow.
Commit metadata is part of the project’s accountability, review, deployment, and audit trail. Copilot only generated a commit message suggestion; it did not author the code. It should never silently add itself as a co-author, especially after the user manually replaces the generated message.
This behavior is also inconsistent. It does not happen on every commit, which makes it behave like a random hidden trap. I only discovered it when checking recent Git commit history before deploying to a test environment.
Please treat this as a product safety and trust issue, not a cosmetic issue.
Requested changes:
Make AI co-author attribution strictly opt-in.
Never add Co-authored-by metadata unless the user explicitly confirms it.
Provide a setting to permanently disable Copilot co-author attribution in commit messages.
Ensure the commit message shown to the user before committing exactly matches the final message written to Git history.
Clearly document when and why Copilot may add commit trailers or metadata.
