Agree, that it is an ad. Also, unless the full session (in a resume-able format, along all session artifact such as intermediate research/docs used to produce the final output) is also included in the commit, the session id is useless.

I presume this is Anthropic trying to their "usage" stats before their IPO.

Funny to compare it to “Sent from iPhone” that Apple appended to emails by default way back when.

It was an ad, but nobody cared because using iPhone was a point of pride.

So many people cared enough to complain, even in the comments here!

People cared. Anyone who did and could do so turned it off immediately as with every service that appends any of that nonsense.

> Anyone who did and could do so turned it off immediately

I know I’m not alone as someone who’s bothered by the postscript, but too lazy to do anything but delete it every time. There’s even an entire (well part of) song about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbdeVhPAbms

Out of curiosity, do these Claude commit messages fall into the same category of "it's annoying but not worth the effort to turn it off"? If yes/no, why?

I cared. Deleting that constantly was pretty annoying. And why would I have pride in whatever device I’m using?

Most people's identities and self worth are tied up in the material things they buy rather than actual self actualization and personal axxomplishments.

Even as a lifelong Apple user and longtime iPhone user, that sig irritated the shit out of me and was instantly disabled whenever I set up a new device.

Also, and this may come as a shock to you and a number of other HN users: I never considered it a "point of pride." I switched because Android was a privacy dumpster fire comparatively and battery life was far better.

I also can't remember a discussion in person with folks where someone seemed "proud" to use an iPhone. If anything, the Android crowd loves to sneer at iPhone users and look down on them as idiots who need a "simpleton" phone.

I'm no simpleton. I ran custom roms and so on. Had F-droid installed, and so on. I do miss the customization, but I also look back and realize I wasted a massive amount of time on installing roms, backups, and the customizations themselves. Probably weeks of my life if not more. My iPhone? I don't. It's a phone. That runs apps. Do I wish I could install whatever I want, particularly given how secure apple's sandboxing is, and thus in theory how safe it should be? sure. but at the end of the day I want to live my life.

Now compare that to why people don’t want Claude in their commit messages or PR descriptions.

Clearly there’s no pride in using agentic coding (if anything, maybe it’s the opposite of pride..). I don’t think most developers want to publicize their use of agentic. But I could be wrong.

"Sent from iPhone" originally was (at least arguably) a "forgive mistakes, phone mail blows".

True. But it was also meant as a counter to “Sent from my Blackberry”.

Obama and a lot of execs were pretty addicted to their BB back in those days.

I'm sorry if this is a naive question, but why can't you just edit the commit message however you like?

Or, for preference, write the whole commit message yourself? It confuses me a great deal to see projects where someone put in a lot of effort to write a useful and detailed prompt but absolutely couldn't be bothered to write a few sentences for the commit.

You can also just turn off attribution in Claude Code settings if it bothers you: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings-reference#attributi...

"To hide all attribution, set commit and pr to empty strings and sessionUrl to false."

I'm not sure i see it as an ad. "Sent from my iPhone" is an ad because the iPhone is not a meaningful part of sending the email. Claude is a meaningful part of the commit though if you're using it, so to me it's more like clarity or transparency than an advertisement.

The way I see it, the conversation transcript is the important part. The specific link to claude.ai nor the model itself is important to me. Otherwise we'll all just be linking out to 10 different AI model providers websites to see history. I'd rather it be some open solution.

Models change so much that I don't really see why anybody cares what model was used to generate the code after the fact. It changes every few months and they're non-deterministic so its not like you'll ever "recreate" the same conversation yourself anyways.

You don't see how a link to "https://claude.ai/.." in the Git log is an ad for Cluade/Anthropic? It feels exactly like "Sent from an iPhone" to me, and has exactly the same value to people reviewing the Git log later (i.e. none).

Keep in mind that if you run across someone else's spam in the Git logs:

- You need a Claude account.

- You need permission to view the session.

The only people who can just follow that link and look at how Claude was used, is Anthropic themselves. Therefore, they can also use it as an additional mechanism to tie sessions back to other IDs/identities. For everyone else this is "Sent from an iPhone" but longer.

If I put a link to the Jira ticket the commit fixes, is that an ad for Atlassian?

Good counterpoint. We link to GitHub from JIRA, and the reverse. Linking to the Claude session that generated the code seems reasonable...it's a related artifact.

One thing I'm not sure about: what is the utility of linking to the session? What are folks expected to do with that data?

for one thing, understanding how the final code ended up that way. it's hard to tell with code alone wherever something is designed or cargo culted.

If _you_ choose to do it, no.

If the tool auto-does it, yes.

You still choose to configure the tool. "It's the default" is only an excuse for the very first time you notice it.

But presumably everyone in your company/team is using Jira, so it's not an "ad" because it's a product already used internally. Claude is appending these links to all commits by default, whether or not others on the team use Claude. Those are very different things.

For me, no. I’ve started tracking session ID on every ticket I work on in order to be able to find them again.

Having it in the commit message is handy (not to mentioned I already have it I. The commit message).

My spade is a meaningful part of digging a hole when I plant a tree, but I still don't want a "Spear and Jackson" sign on my tree when I'm done.

There has been more than I project where I literally didn’t even look at the code.

I prompted what amounts to verbose “I want X” and then did QA. I’m perfectly happy with an LLM being credited with that code and there being no copyright existing for that code.

For some people that is their life’s work and they want to clutch pearls. Their sole contribution was a half baked idea and they shipped QA out to their “users” but they want to be credited with any rights.

There is definitely a continuum in LLM usage for code, do I agree with an AI blindly stamping every commit, not really.

Do I see LLM generated code as equivalent to me digging a hole with a shovel, it depends. Sometimes there was very little shovelling, other times there was no me involved and you may as well credit the entire hole to the shovel.

Where this will come in is when it comes to copyright and licensing.

If your entire product is LLM generated you sure as hell have no right to place any license on there other than potentially a MIT equivalent license, even that is dubious though but from an organisational standpoint MIT probably will be more widely accepted than saying it is uncopyrightable.

My argument being I would rather know that you didn’t even look at the code, which is what this will achieve, whether I agree with it or not at the very least it will make it easier to sift through the garbage.

This is a problem with copyright in general. There's no longer any requirement to provide information about copyright status, so there's no way for the public to know whether something is copyrighted (no doubt the uncertainty is intentional as an additional way to undermine the public domain). This is just as true for expired copyrights, or material placed in the public domain intentionally.

The solution isn't to add notices to non-copyrighted things; it's to require notice for copyrighted things, including date.

Individually, of course, one should simply assume things are not copyrighted if you have no way to know, and do whatever you want. If the author can't be bothered to tell you, you have no moral responsibility to care.

> If your entire product is LLM generated you sure as hell have no right to place any license on there

Something you’ve created from nothing because of the tool you’ve used to create it should not be allowed to be licensed?

> "Sent from my iPhone" is an ad because the iPhone is not a meaningful part of sending the email.

It explains the brevity and any typos. That's how I see it used.