"Co-Authored-By: Claude": the three camps of the debate

· Published · 1 min read

I asked yesterday whether you own the Co-Authored-By: Claude lines in your commits.

And I did not expect it to turn into such a debate hahaha!

So it brought out lots of more or less good reasons, which I’ve compiled here to sum them up.

Camp 1: those who keep the line

  • Intellectual honesty.
  • Why bother?
  • They keep the responsibility.
  • It becomes a metric (that’s an interesting one): the share of AI-generated code, correlation when analysing an incident, help when reviewing PRs.
  • A proposal to go further: flag the model, the provider, etc. to make that data even better for analysis.

Camp 2: those who remove it (for good reasons)

  • Visual noise: the Claude icon all over GitHub, hiding the real authors (true!).
  • We never signed our commits with our IDE or our compiler.
  • Anthropic takes no responsibility for the commit… so why co-sign?
  • No wish to give free advertising to your provider.

Camp 3: those who remove it because they don’t own it

(A cheap little jab haha)

Where I stand

For now, I’m still on team own-it, including on the client projects I back, keeping in mind that potentially going further with the model, for analysis later on, is really interesting!

Thanks to everyone who took part in the debate :)

Happy coding!

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