Co-author added without consent and can't be turned off!?

Ideas Feedback
25

nice write up, hope cursor staff gets to see this and put into consideration

26

i just arrived here to complain - cursor !
W T F ???

This gives me trust-issues big time !

29

Wow, minimal engagement is putting it lightly lol..

34

You can find those parameters documented here!

35

Well, that is just damage control. If marking the code to track AI, why not put their assisting AI model instead? You have IDE product, the kind of VS. Where is the co-author part there? Why not make the customer decide?

This was poor decision. The kind of trust breaking. I seriously think to cancel subscriptions.

37

I get the idea here - AI transparency is useful. However claiming ā€œcursoragentā€ as the co-author is 100% stolen valor from the actual model that co-authored the code. Sorry cursor, your prompt engineering is not the author, the model is. Imagine git claiming it was the committer or VS Code claiming it was co-author.

If you want to do this right, then keep track of all the agent models in the context and add those as co-authors. If you must show off in the git commit, adding a note on the tooling used might be useful, but make sure you add credit for any mcp servers, etc and other AI tooling that was included

Definitely turned this off, but I left it turned on in Claude Code, which correctly identifies the AI model it used

3 Likes
38

Hard no. Under copyright law in my and many other countries:

  1. the initial creator of a work holds copyright to a work, a human person. This is one of the three moral rights you get by the act of creation
  2. the creator can assign copyright by contract to a company or other person (but, fun fact, cannot sell or assign their moral rights)

Cursor Agentā€™s insertion of itself into the act of creation disturbs this legal chain of custody and is utterly wrong and unacceptable. Weakening this to grant authorship to the model is equally unacceptable. It would be like giving Word co-ownership of a book you wrote with it.

Again, absolutely 100% this must be removed or defaulted off if you want a setting nobody will turn on.

5 Likes
42

Cursor Team : There is NO WAY going forward that you sneak this in again. Itā€™s a matter of trust. You can not set this as a DEFAULT. Best would be that you remove this REALLY BAD idea entirely !

1 Like
44

This should have been a popup ā€œHey do you wanna enable Cursor co-authorship attribution trailer messages in your commits and Pull Requests? Yes, No.
Please stop adding things we donā€™t really want enabled by default.

2 Likes
45

Hey all!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. I think the discussion has run its course (everything that can be said has been said), so Iā€™m going to close the thread here.

If you come across this thread in the future, you can still refer to the docs about turning Agent Attribution off.

3 Likes