Summary: AI-authored commits and PRs
The standard convention
Section titled “The standard convention”Add 'remember me' checkbox to login form
[commit body with what and why]
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <[email protected]>Sometimes paired with:
Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <[email protected]>When to include the trailer
Section titled “When to include the trailer”Include: AI substantially contributed (typed the diff, drafted commit message, did the structural work).
Don’t include: human typed everything; AI was only consulted for research; AI provided line-level help only.
The principle: be honest about the level of AI involvement.
Six failure modes to weight in AI-code review
Section titled “Six failure modes to weight in AI-code review”- Hallucinated APIs call functions that don’t exist
- Plausible-but-wrong logic looks right, solves wrong problem
- Trivial test assertions pass without checking meaningful properties
- Confident-but-wrong docstrings describe wrong behavior with authority
- Style mimicry over correctness means consistent style isn’t evidence of correctness
- Missing edge cases means happy path covered; edge cases glossed
The accountability principle
Section titled “The accountability principle”The human who merges the work is responsible, regardless of who typed it.
Don’t merge AI-authored code you don’t understand. Time savings come from AI handling the typing, not from humans skipping review.
PR descriptions
Section titled “PR descriptions”State AI involvement clearly. Test plans should be human-written. Don’t paste AI chain-of-thought as the description.
Release notes
Section titled “Release notes”User-facing: light acknowledgment at the release level (e.g., “Produced with assistance from Claude Code”). Per-feature attribution typically not done.
Internal: more transparency for process calibration. Track AI involvement metrics. Refine review checklists based on observed failure modes.
git log --grep="Co-Authored-By.*Claude" --oneline # all Claude-co-authoredSearchable trailers enable incident review, process calibration, tooling decisions.
Voice anchor
Section titled “Voice anchor”Git stores snapshots. Every other command is just navigating those snapshots.
The author is a metadata field on the snapshot. The trailer is additional metadata. Whether human or AI typed the code, git stores and serves the snapshot identically. The conventions are social, not technical.
What you carry into L16
Section titled “What you carry into L16”L16 closes the track with a speculative look at where git might evolve in an AI-collaborative world. Grounded in patterns visible today, not pure speculation.