If IDEA recorded my manual edits as events and attached a transcript to my commits I don't think I'd mind. If they just tagged it to put their name in that's different.

Knowing which model created the code has more "weight" to it than the editor IMHO which is why I think this is different. Adding the session link is a nice touch.

In my last project I wrote most stuff by hand but also used various Anthropic models, Gemini something and GLM 5.2. By line count the #1 was probably the IDE autocomplete though mostly for boring field initializations and the likes. The "hardest" part was some reverse engineering by GLM that Claude refused but that resultend in zero lines directly. So, how to attribute this?

Allowing tools to insert themselves into the git history only makes sense if you are purely vibecoding with a single model and don't even bother to check and clean it up anymore. Is this truly the default state of software development already? How the times have changed.

I suspect that in the future, lawyers are going to start counseling businesses to implement line-by-line provenance of their source code so they’re prepared for future copyright infringement disputes. Business leaders may also start wanting metrics to understand the impact of AI on development in a more detailed way.

A traditional IDE isn’t writing code for you.

code generator ide plugins have been around for a long long time

Which ones are you thinking of? Were they actually generating code, or were they loading in templates or mechanically building interface stubs?

Like "code generator IDE plugins".

There are hundreds of them for just about every IDE you can think of.

I can't tell if this is a serious question or not, but metaprogramming/generators are decades old concepts that have been common features of basically every IDE since the 90s.

And what is the good old autocomplete feature? Do you attribute it authorship, too?

Is a series of matrix multiplications on a token vector not a mechanical transformation?

Where is the point where you start to anthropomorphize it?

That’s a great question, and is why we have these debates, and have courts to adjudicate disputes. I don’t have all the answers, but the gap between these different behaviors seems pretty wide to me.

Autocomplete doesn’t really work until you start typing. The fact that my phone recognizes that I’m starting to type a word and the IDE offers the most statistically likely choice for me to accept doesn’t make those words its own. Same with autocomplete on a phone or in a word processor when entering sentences.

FWIW the Copyright Office, for its part, recognizes that AI generated code is mechanically generated and its opinion is that it’s not copyrightable.

But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about attribution and when it becomes important. To me the metaprogramming/codegen case is different because of the nature of the mechanism, particularly if you wrote the inputs that the IDE transformed on your behalf.

So “create an express app boilerplate, make no mistakes” requires attribution but “npx express-generator myapp” does not?

The bar for “writes code for you” is very low.

That’s my opinion, yes.

What, specifically, do you have against it?

Nothing at all, I just think its a rather arbitrary distinction, especially when you consider heuristic methods like autocomplete that have been around for ages.

Line-drawing exercises are frequently difficult. :-)

It's still code generation, a compiler also generates code, why do you sound like you are arguing LLMs are the only path to generating code now?