Stop polluting git history with a marketing gimmick by pretending your AI assistant is a human and adding it to the Co-authored-by: trailer. If anything, use a dedicated AI-assistant: trailer that actually has useful information about the tooling you used.

When creating a commit, Claude will add some text and a Co-authored-by: trailer.

🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

This post was inspired by a discussion on reddit where some people mentioned that it is actually useful to know the commit was AI assisted. And I agree. But I have several problems with how Claude does it now.

Git trailers are not formalized centrally, git itself only treats the Signed-off-by: trailer somewhat specially (it can be configured to add it automatically). Otherwise it parses any key: value entry, for users to do with them what they want. Having said that, there are existing conventions. Git’s own contributing mentions that

Co-authored-by: is used to indicate that people exchanged drafts

and is universally expected to have the same structure as the Signed-off-by: trailer: My Name <myemail@example.com>. That is, it’s meant to be a person. Using this field to mention that AI was used means:

  • separating human contributors from used tools now requires manual parsing,
  • a completely useless email address is added to the trailer to not break existing expectations,
  • although the model is mentioned, the commit may have actually involved multiple models, and the actual tool doesn’t even fit into the format.

The way it is done now is also clearly focused on marketing, using the trailer that shows up on e.g. github’s interface and using a separate full line to link Claude Code itself.

Claude is not a person, Claude is a program with a specific version, using a specific version of a model. I propose, that if marking AI assistance is needed, a new commit trailer should be introduced that should include the tool you are using (e.g. Claude Code, OpenCode, Amp etc.) and the model being used. Or if multiple models were used for different phases, that can also fit in there:

AI-assistant: OpenCode v1.0.203 (Claude Opus 4.5)
AI-assistant: OpenCode v1.0.203 (plan: Claude Opus 4.5, edit: Claude Sonnet 4.5)

If people think this information is important enough, then forges can make it easy to visually find this information without having to hijack an already established convention.