Co-Authored-By: Makita
Sigurd Fosseng Imagine a carpenter who lists his drill as co-contractor on the building permit. Makita Tools Inc is responsible for load-bearing wall, third floor. You would think he had lost his mind, or his nerve.
And yet here we are, shipping commits tagged Co-Authored-By: Claude, believing this is transparency.
It is not. If you commit it, you own it. Every line. Authorship is not about where the tokens came from. It is about who decided what enters the codebase and who owns it once it’s there. The tag does not clarify responsibility. It diffuses it.
So why do we reach for it? We have pasted Stack Overflow answers into a project. We have hit Tab on a Copilot suggestion without reading the next three lines. None of those commits say Co-Authored-By: Stack Overflow. So what changed?
The difference with Claude is not about attribution. It is about how much control we felt slipping. And the tag does not solve that problem. It confesses it.