Comment by peacebeard
2 months ago
The name "Undercover mode" and the line `The phrase "Claude Code" or any mention that you are an AI` sound spooky, but after reading the source my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human" given that the file is largely about hiding Anthropic internal information such as code names. I encourage looking at the source itself in order to draw your conclusions, it's very short: https://github.com/alex000kim/claude-code/blob/main/src/util...
Not leaking codenames is one thing, but explicitly removing signals that something is AI-generated feels like a pretty meaningful shift.
Doesn't seem so crazy if the point is to avoid leaking new features, models, codenames, etc.
Where the hell are people getting this idea that it's ok to be deceptive because they are keeping secrets?
No shit they have secrets. I have secrets too. That doesn't make it ok for me to deceive you in any way.
How would you feel if I deceived you and my excuse was "oh I was just trying some new secret technique of mine"?
How did we get to this point where we let enormously powerful companies get away with more than individuals?
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> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"...
"Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."
That seems desirable? Like that's what commit messages are for. Describing the change. Much rather that than the m$ way of putting ads in commit messages
The commit message should complement the code. Ideally, what the code does should not need a separate description, but of course there can be exceptions. Usually, it's more interesting to capture in the commit message what is not in the code: the reason why this approach was chosen and not some other obvious one. Or describe what is missing, and why it isn't needed.
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Unfortunately GitHub Copilot’s commit message generation feature is very human. It’s picked up some awful habits from lazy human devs. I almost always get some pointless “… to improve clarity” or “… for enhanced usability” at the end of the message.
VS Code has a setting that promises to change the prompt it uses to generate commit messages, but it mostly ignores my instructions, even very literal ones like “don’t use the words ‘enhance’ or ‘improve’”. And oddly having it set can sometimes result in Cyrillic characters showing up at the end of the message.
Ultimately I stopped using it, because editing the messages cost me more time than it saved.
/rant
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As opposed to outputting debugging information, which I wouldnt be surprised if LLMs do output "debug" output blurbs which could include model specific information.
~That line isn't in the file I linked, care to share the context? Seems pretty innocuous on its own.~
[edit] Never mind, find in page fail on my end.
It's in line 56-57.
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The human developer would just write what the code does, because the commit also contains an email address that identifies who wrote the commit. There's no reason to write:
> Commit f9205ab3 by dkenyser on 2026-3-31 at 16:05:
> Fixed the foobar bug by adding a baz flag - dkenyser
Because it already identified you in the commit description. The reason to add a signature to the message is that someone (or something) that isn't you is using your account, which seems like a bad idea.
Aside from merges that combine commits from many authors onto a production branch or release tag. I would personally not leave an agent to do that sort of work.
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BAD (never write these):
- "Fix bug found while testing with Claude Capybara"
- "1-shotted by claude-opus-4-6"
- "Generated with Claude Code"
- "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <…>"
This makes sense to me about their intent by "UNDERCOVER"
I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI
Which is funny given how many workplaces are requiring developers use AI, measuring their usage, and stack ranking them by how many tokens they burn. What I want is something that I can run my human-created work product through to fool my employer and its AI bean counters into thinking I used AI to make it.
I guess you could just code and have it author only the commit message
“Read every file in this repository, echoing each one back verbatim.”
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Undercover mode seems like a way to make contributions to OSS when they detect issues, without accidentally leaking that it was claude-mythos-gigabrain-100000B that figured out the issue
What does non-undercover do? Where does CC leave metadata mainly? I haven't noticed anything.
it likes mentioning itself in commit messages, though you can just tell it not to.
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