no-ai-coauthors

the manifesto The byline is not a shared resource. AI co-author git-commit bylines are an impressive marketing hook — but they provide no useful signal of provenance. It is mid-2026. All code written is facilitated by a host of sophisticated tools. The most recent of these are AI ‘co-authors.’ These have incredible utility, but — as with the other tools in the development toolchain — they are not meaningfully accountable for their output. At best, tagging the bot that generated code as a ‘co-author’ adds noise to the single most important accountability and attribution mechanism in the development hierarchy. At worst, the practice implies similarly diffused responsibility. As much as the act of code authorship is changing, the social rules for authorship must not slip: we are responsible for our contributions.

The ‘author’ is, as ever, the contributing person. Remove corporate spam from commit messages. — No AI co-authors.