GitHub's Copilot Code Co-Authorship Opt-In

In this brief video, I walk through a quiet GitHub change that flips VS Code commits to default-attribute Copilot as co-author — opt-out, not opt-in — and we explain why this is more than a UX gripe. Instead, it could be seen as a mercenary tactic to inflate usage numbers. But worse than that, its second-order damage is that every human-written commit now reads as AI-co-authored, which means anyone training a future coding model has to either include that data and risk model collapse, or throw it away and lose the human-written ground truth GitHub used to be the gold mine for.

A second order degree of separation that could kill the code-data training-data of the future.

And this isn’t a takedown. I absolutely love GitHub. I know many of the people that run GitHub. The point is: GitHub is better than this — and I suspect you might come to a similar conclusion. And if we dive a little deeper, there might be something even darker here. It might be something even more nefarious. It might be a a governance structure that only GitHub can mine. Boy-oh-boy, do I hope that it’s not this list case.

Topics covered:

• The change: GitHub stealth-default-flipped Copilot co-author attribution from opt-in to opt-out in VS Code

• Why opt-in vs opt-out is the entire ethics question (Intel-style attribution rules)

• Why this is likely an executive-deck number-padding, fake engagement

• A second-order degree of separation: model collapse via degrees of separation reasoning