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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Imagine a human co-author on a work. "Written with a co-author" would not be sufficient attribution.

That’s Apples to Oranges. Me saying “Co-authored by Joe Smith” gives the human, Joe Smith, possible exposure and definite credit.

“Co-authored by Copilot” gives a multi billion dollar corp free advertising. I don’t care about them. I do care about Joe though.

Knowing it was Copilot vs Claude vs ChatGPT makes a difference just like knowing it was Joe Smith vs John Doe

It really doesn't. Same as we don't say "written with vi" or "written by Emacs", even if it is intuitively clear one of the two is better.

I don't know why dylan604 is trying to die on this hill but thats the point, you can't tell apart people using different tools, everybody has their own preferences.

Case in point, I have no way to know if dylan604 is even a real human at this point.

I'm much more believable as a human than an account made 38 days ago :face-palm:

Here's a bit of self-awareness you can take away from our conversation: We can't read your mind and neither can you.

Just like how you know that Brawndo™ is the different, better version of the pedestrian "water" that everyone drinks.

How could it possibly be product placement? It's got electrolytes!

Positive credit is not the only purpose of attribution.

There's also the named authors not taking credit for something they didn't fully do, regardless of whether the credit goes to someone else.

There's also traceability, if the authors/provenance needs to be considered because of some kind of problem or potential problem -- technical, legal, security, or otherwise.

> There's also the named authors not taking credit for something they didn't fully do

Advertising in git commits is not ever going to substantially discredit these people or hold them accountable.

Your caring about the entity cited doesn't actually change the nature of the citation. Your saying "Co-authored by Copilot" does the same thing--gives Copilot possible exposure and definite credit--even if it doesn't need it and you don't care about it.

A clanker isn’t a human it’s a tool. I don’t write “Coauthored by VSCode” when I use find and replace.

I write "reported by gcc16 -pedantic" when I'm fixing a bug, because it's useful to flag "this is how they issue became visible" in case readers want to use the same tool on their code.

The fact that it's just a tool is irrelevant. You don't need to mention search and replace because everyone already knows that exists... mind you I have had commit messages which included sed commandlines, for ease of future reuse.

I know this is a bit off tangent - but can you please convey that point to every damned dev/team that ends up with a freaking ".vscode" directory in their repo

I use the GNU Autotools toolchain to generate VSCode folders. We are not the same!

(The first sentence isn't a joke.)

I have done that in the past to provide zero-setup development environments for our internal python packages.

What's the problem with the approach?

Do you also have .DS_Store tracked? If not, you are obviously not who the commenter is referring to and missing the point

They don't know what a global git ignore is and if you tell them they don't care.

Find and replace behaves the same in most IDEs, but for large changes, the specific LLM can affect the generated code for the same prompt

So does my brain, but no one complains. If I’ve read and understand all of the code it’s effectively the same thing. I’m washing the LLM output so it’s clean. My brain parses the LLMs code and deems it safe.

Why does the LLM need the same attribution as a human? Feels like a false equivalence.

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