Comment by alemanek

14 hours ago

Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable. Even if this feature worked correctly, it obviously doesn’t, this should at minimum be a prompt after upgrade to let the user confirm that this is what they want. But honestly should be opt in for those that want it.

To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.

This kind of thing being released speaks to a greater disfunction over there. Not a good look at all and I am not a Microsoft or AI hater. But my commit messages are not where you move fast and break things

15 comments

alemanek

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Aperocky  14 hours ago

Well, the good news is commit messages are some of the most visible thing, and there are no silent modifications that are really possible.

The bad news is - where else have this happened in VS Code?

- A happy user of (n)vim

  • echoangle  2 hours ago

    > Well, the good news is commit messages are some of the most visible thing, and there are no silent modifications that are really possible.

    The problem is that it's only visible after committing, it doesn't seem to show in the integrated git view when you prepare the commit.

Aerolfos  9 hours ago

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.

I noticed that as soon as you make a bug report/feature request on VSCode's repo, you instantly get someone's OpenClaw agent with an automated pull request that sometimes wants to change defaults in the main codebase

Looks like AI is really trigger-happy with that, with zero understanding or care that there's thousands of users affected and it's not just one individual's settings.json

Also, the hallucinated PR does not necessarily address the original issue whatsoever, just like this PR. It should have functionality to detect AI-authored code, but whoever made the PR skipped actually doing the hard work and just changed a default to always on, exactly the kind of misunderstanding you see with OpenClaw shotgun PRs

  • zelphirkalt  8 hours ago

    And then they apparently posted an alibi "I'm sorry" here. Or maybe it is genuine, but the choice is between incompetence and fake "I'm sorry". Where is QA?

    • IshKebab  8 hours ago

      As far as I know VSCode doesn't really have QA. I'm not sure it even has tests, which makes it very surprising that it works as well as it does!

      1 reply →

zzo38computer  9 hours ago

> To have it silently just start adding marketing copy to git commit messages is pretty bad. To have that added text not be visible to the user in the UI so they can remove it before commit is just much worse.

This is one of the problems, but it is not only one. To be better, should be:

1. It should be visible in the UI for entering the commit message, to make it clear what it is doing.

2. It should not add such a thing if the Copilot is disabled. (It is mentioned by dmitriv and would hopefully be fixed soon enough)

I do not use Copilot nor any other LLMs nor VS Code, but if the problems are corrected then I think the feature would probably be reasonable.

  • dmitriv  9 hours ago

    Agreed on both points. Having it shown before going into the commit would let the developer decide whether they want it. #2 is fixed in my PR.

    • adastra22  7 hours ago

      Thank you for being upfront and engaging with us on this. This was a breach of trust, but your engagement here is commendable.

imron  7 hours ago

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable

How else is a poor programmer gonna hit their KPIs and get that promo?

boxed  8 hours ago

> Changing the default behavior for all of your users with no notification is pretty unforgivable.

What does that even mean? The git log exists. Do you mean they should shove the entire git log in the face of every user on every update?

Obviously this change was a massive fuckup, but that sentence makes absolutely no sense.

  • alemanek  2 hours ago

    It just means that when changing a global default with such impact the user should be prompted with an option to opt out of the new behavior. Something like “AI assisted changes will now have ‘coauthored by Copilot’ added to the commit message”. If the user clicks “no thanks” it changes their local setting to “off” to opt them out of this new global default.