I cringe every time I see Claude trying to co-author a commit. The git history is expected to track accountability and ownership, not your Bill of Tools. Should I also co-author my PRs with my linter, intellisense and IDE?
Needing to flag nontrivial code as generated was standard practice for my whole career.
I use good ol' C-x M-c M-butterfly.
AI and humans are not the same as authors of PRs. As an obvious example: one of the important functions of the PR process is to teach the writer about how to code in this project but LLMs fundamentally don't learn the same way as humans so there's a meaningful difference in context between humans and AIs.
If a human takes the care to really understand and assume authorship of the PR then it's not really an issue (and if they do, they could easily modify the Claude messages to remove "generated by Claude" notes manually) but instead it seems that Claude is just hiding relevant context from the reviewer. PRs without relevant context are always frustrating.
If this is not the case you should not be sending it to public repos for review at all. It is rude and insulting to expect the people maintaining these repos to review code that nobody bothered to read.
The difference here is that the generator is a non-deterministic LLM and you can't reason about its output the same way.
As for LLM code assistants, I don't really view them as traditional code generation tools in the first place, as in practice they more resemble something in between autocomplete and delegating to a junior programmer.
As for attribution, I view it more or less the same way as "dictated but not read" in written correspondance, i.e., an disclaimer for errors in the code, which may be considered rude in some contexts, and a perfectly acceptable and useful annotation in others.
No. I don't want to test and pick through your shitty LLM generated code. If I wanted the entire code base to be junk, it'd say so in the readme.
How about compiler?
Similarly, if I use e.g. jextract or uniffi to generate Java interfaces from C code and check that in, I'll create tooling to automatically run those, and the commit will be attributed to that tooling.
This is not at all the case with LLM-generated code - mostly because you can't regenerate it even if you wanted to, as it's not deterministic.
That said, I do agree that LLM code is different enough from human code (even just in regards to potential copyright worries) that it should be mentioned that LLMs were used to create it.
Replace gRPC compiler with LLM. Can you reproduce? (probably not 100%). Can anybody fix it short of throwing more english phrases like "DO NOT", "NEVER", "Under No Circumstances"?
Probably not.
How? LSTM?
The following comment in the blog post
//go:generate stringer -type=Pill
I would find it very reasonable to commit that with 'Co-Authored-By: stringer v0.1.0' or such.
Or 'sed s/a/b/g' and 'Co-Authored-By: sed'
Arguably snippet collections belong to this genre.
I thought the argument was that AI-users were reviewing and understanding all of the code?
But at this point i am more curious if git will continue to be the best tool.
But for me at least, a tool like Git seems pretty essential for inspecting changes and deciding which to keep, which to reroll, and which to rewrite. (I'm not particularly attached to Git but an interface like Magit and a nice CLI for inspecting and manipulating history seem important to me.)
What are you imagining VCS software doing differently that might play nicer with LLM agents?
Check out Mitchell Hashimoto’s podcast episode on the pragmatic engineer. He starts talking about AI at 1:16:41. At some point after that he discusses git specifically, and how in some cases it becomes impossible to push because the local branch is always out of date.
Almost like writing “Code was created with the help of IntelliSense”.
It'll also become more important to know what code was actually written by humans.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Exposure and discovery aren’t that tightly correlated. Maybe there’s a small effect, but I think it is outweighed by the fact that blast radius and spread is reduced while buying time for discovery.
hmm gotta try that
At least at my workplace though, it's just assumed now that you are using the tools.
I mean, of course I would read most of the code during review, but as a human, I often skip things by mistake
In commercial settings you are often required to label your produce and inform about things like 'Made in China' or possible adverse effects of consumption.
I don't understand why people consider Claude-generated code to be their own. You authored the prompts, not the code. Somehow this was never a problem with pre-LLM codegen tools, like macro expanders, IPC glue, or type bundle generators. I don't recall anybody desperately removing the "auto-generated do not edit" comments those tools would nearly always slap at the top of each file or taking offense when someone called that code auto-generated. Back in the day we even used to publish the "real" human-written source for those, along with build scripts!
Ideally, if I contribute to any codebase, what needs to be judged is the resulting code. Is it up to the project's standards ? Does the maintainer have design objections ?
What tool you use shouldn't matter, be it your IDE or your LLM.
But that also means you should be accountable for it, you shouldn't defend behind "But Claude did this poorly, not me !", I don't care (in a friendly way), just fix the code if you want to contribute.
The big caveat to this is not wanting AI-Generated code for ideological reasons, and well, if you want that you can make your contributors swear they wrote it by themselves in the PR text or whatever.
I'm not really sure how to feel about this, but I stand by my "the code is what matters" line.
Since AI tools are constantly obsoleted, generate different output each run, and it is often impossible to run them locally, the input prompts are somewhat useless for everyone but the initial user.
I don't meant this as a drive by bazinga either, the practice of copying code or thinking you understand it when you don't is nothing new
I regularly have tool-generated commits. I send them out with a reference to the tool, what the process is, how much it's been reviewed and what the expectation is of the reviewer.
Otherwise, they all assume "human authored" and "human sponsored". Reviewers will then send comments (instead of proposing the fix themselves). When you're wrangling several hundred changes, that becomes unworkable.
Absolutely. That would be hilarious.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse
If your linter is able to action requests, then it probably makes sense to add too.
Ah, so you kinda maybe sorta absolve yourself of culpability (but not really — "I didn't know this was copyrighted material" didn't grant you copyright), and simultaneously make fixing the potentially compromised codebase (someone else's job, hopefully) 100x harder because the history of which bits might've been copied was never kept.
Solid advice! As ethical as it is practical.
By the same measure, junkyards should avoid keeping receipts on the off chance that the catalytic converters some randos bring in after midnight are stolen property.
Better not document it.
One little trick the legal folks don't want you to know!
This is also useful for keeping your prompts commit-sized, which in my experience gives much better results than just letting it spin or attempting to one-shot large features.
The point isn't to hijack accountability. It's free publicity, like how Apple adds "Sent from my IPhone."
Kinda, yeah. If I automatically apply lint suggestions, I would title my commit "apply lint suggestions".
co-authoring doesn't hide your authorship
if I see someone committing a blatantly wrong code, I would wonder what tool they actually used
It becomes legally challenging with regards to ownership if I ever use work equipment for a personal project. If it later takes off they could very well try to claim ownership in its entirety simply because I ran a test once (yes, there's a while silicon valley season for it).
I don't know if they'd win, but Anthropic absolutely would be able to claim the creation of that code was done on their hardware. Obviously we aren't employees of theirs, though we are customers that very likely never read what we agreed to in a signup flow.
Anthropic's user agreement does not have a similar agreement.
I don't know of ant precedent where the code was literally generated on someone else's system. Its an open question whether that implies any legal right to the work and I could pretty easily see a court accepting the case.
In some jurisdictions (e.g. the UK) the law is already clear that you own the copyright. In the US it is almost certain that you will be the author. The reports of cases saying otherwise I have been misreported - the courts found the AI could not own the copyright.
> The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law.
Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken"
Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts?
In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright.
It looks like it will be decided on a case by case basis.
It will also differ between countries, so if you are distributing software internationally what will be a constraint on treating the code as not copyrightable.
Very good question I would think it is. You are just using a mechanical system to transform your prompt to something else, Right?
But, a distiguishing factor may be that:
1. Output of the LLM for the same prompt can vary
2. So you don't really have "control" over what the AI produces
3. Therefore you should not get a copyright to the output of the LLM because you had very little to say about how that transformation (from prompt to code) was made.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Thaler v. Perlmutter: The D.C. Circuit Court affirmed in March 2025 that the Copyright Act requires works to be authored "in the first instance by a human being," a ruling the Supreme Court left intact by declining to hear the case in 2026.
And in the US constitution,
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-8...
Authors and inventors, courts have ruled, means people. Only people. A monkey taking a selfie with your camera doesn't mean you own a copyright. An AI generating code with your computer is likewise, devoid of any copyright protection.
The ruling says that the LLM cannot be the author. It does not say that the human being using the LLM cannot be the author. The ruling was very clear that it did not address whether a human being was the copyright holder because Thaler waived that argument.
the position with a monkey using your camera is similar, and you may or may not hold the copyright depending on what you did - was it pure accident or did you set things up. Opinions on the well known case are mixed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Where wildlife photographers deliberately set up a shot to be triggered automatically (e.g. by a bird flying through the focus) they do hold the copyright.
AI generated code has no copyright. And if it DID somehow have copyright, it wouldn't be yours. It would belong to the code it was "trained" on. The code it algorithmically copied. You're trying to have your cake, and eat it too. You could maybe claim your prompts are copyrighted, but that's not what leaked. The AI generated code leaked.
> the Copyright Office concludes that existing legal doctrines are adequate and appropriate to resolve questions of copyrightability. Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by- case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
So the TL;DR basically implies pure slop within the current guidelines outlined in conclusions is NOT copyrightable. However collaboration with an AI copyrightability is determined on a case by case basis. I will preface this all with the standard IANAL, I could be wrong etc, but with the concluding language using "unlikely" copyrightable for slop it sounds less cut and dry than you imply.
You have no idea how bad this leak is for Anthropic because with the copyright office, you have a DUTY TO DISCLOSE any AI generated work, and it is fully RETROACTIVE. And what is part of this leak? undercover.ts. https://archive.is/S1bKY Where Claude is specifically instructed to HIDE DISCLOSURE of AI generated work.
That's grounds for the copyright office and courts to reject ANY copyright they MIGHT have had a right to. It is one of the WORST things they could have done with regard to copyright.
https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/when-registeri...
I'm interpreting your most recent reply to me as an implication that I'm taking the conclusions you yourself linked out of context. I'm trying to give the benefit of the doubt here, but the 3 linked PDF documents aren't "a mountain of evidence" supporting your argument. Maybe I missed something in one of those documents (very possible), but the conclusions are not how you imply.
Whether or not a specific git commit message correctly sites Claude usage or not may further muddy the waters more than IP lawyers are comfortable with at this time (and therefore add inherent risk to current and future copyright claims of said works), but those waters were far from crystal clear in the first place.
Again, IANAL, but from my limited layman perspective it does not appear the copyright office plans to, at this moment in time, concisely reject AI collaborated works from copyright.
Your most recent link (Finnegan) is from an IP lawyer consortium that says it's better to include attribution and disclosure of AI to avoid current and future claim rejections. Sounds like basic cover-your-ass lawyer speak, but I could be wrong.
Full disclosure: I primarily use AI (or rather agentic teams) as N sets of new eyeballs on the current problem at hand, to help debug or bounce ideas off of, so I don't really have much skin in this particular game involving direct code contributions spit out by LLMs. Those that have any risk aversion, should probably proceed with caution. I just find the upending of copyright (and many other) norms by GenAI morbidly fascinating.
I was not aware of that. WHo has that duty and when do they have it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47594044
That comment is spot on. Claude adding a co-author to a commit is documentation to put a clear line between code you wrote and code claude generated which does not qualify for copyright protection.
The damning thing about this leak is the inclusion of undercover.ts. That means Anthropic has now been caught red handed distributing a tool designed to circumvent copyright law.
The copyright office still holds that human authorship is a core tenet of copyrightability, however, whether or not a submission meets the "de minimis" amount of AI-generated material to uphold a copyright claim is still being decided and refined by the courts and at the moment the distinction appears to fall on whether the AI was used "as a tool" or as "an author itself", with the former covered in certain cases and the latter not.
The registration process makes it clear that failure to disclose submissions in large contribution authored by contractor or ai can result in a rejection of copyright claim now or retroactive on discovery.
I do not know whether any other country even has copyright registration.
Your main point that this is something the courts (or new legislation) will decide is, of course, correct. I am inclined to think this is only a problem for people who are vibe coding. The moment a human contributes to the code that bit is definitely covered by copyright, and unless you can clearly separate out human and AI contributed bits saying the AI written bits are not covered is not going to make a practical difference.