The New Git Blame: Who’s Responsible When AI Writes the Code?

July 3, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Alissa V.

git blame used to be simple.

It told you who wrote a line of code—and maybe, if you squinted at the commit message, why.

But now? That line might’ve been written by GPT-4. Or Claude. Or merged automatically by a bot you forgot existed.

And when something breaks in production, no one’s quite sure who’s on the hook.

We’re entering a new era of software development—where authorship, responsibility, and accountability are getting harder to untangle.

Claude Tried to Co-Author My Commit

Let’s start with a real example.

Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant, automatically adds itself as a co-author on any commit it helps generate:

Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>

You don’t ask it to. It just does it by default.

And for a while, that email address wasn’t registered to Anthropic on GitHub. So in some public repos, Claude commits showed up as authored by a completely unrelated user—someone who had claimed that address first.

So now your commit history says:

“This line was written by Claude… and also Panchajanya1999?”
Even if the attribution worked, Claude still provides:

No prompt history

No reviewer

No model version

No audit trail

If that line breaks production, good luck tracing it back to anything useful.

If you’re using Claude, disable this by setting:

includeCoAuthoredBy: false in your Claude config.

But the bigger issue? This is what happens when AI tries to act like a teammate—without any of the structure real teammates require.

When Git Blame Isn’t Enough

Claude isn’t the only case. Here’s how authorship is already breaking in modern, AI-powered workflows:

Scenario	What Happened	`git blame` Says	What’s Missing
Copilot bug	Dev accepts a buggy autocomplete	Dev is blamed	No trace AI was involved
Bot opens PR	LLM agent opens PR, human merges	Bot is author	No reviewer listed
AI refactor	Script rewrites 100+ files	Bot owns commit	Was it tested or reviewed?
Auto-review	ChatGPT-style bot approves PR	from bot	No human ever looked at it

Developers Are Reframing AI Responsibility

Teams are starting to adopt new mental models:

AI as a tool → You used it, you own the result.
AI as a junior dev → It drafts, you supervise.
AI as an agent → It acts independently, so policy and traceability matter.
AI as a teammate → It commits code? Then it needs review, metadata, and accountability.

One lightweight approach:

Bot Sponsorship — any AI-authored or reviewed PR must have a named human who takes responsibility.

Making AI-Assisted Development Accountable

Here are a few things teams are doing to keep ownership clear and prevent surprise postmortems:

1. Annotate commits and PRs clearly

git commit -m "Refactor auth logic [AI]"
Co-authored-by: GPT-4o <noreply@openai.com>
Reviewed-by: @tech-lead

In PR descriptions:

### AI Involvement
Model: Claude 3  
Prompt: "Simplify caching layer"  
Prompted by: @victoria-dev  
Reviewed by: @tech-lead

2. Store lightweight metadata

ai_contribution:
  model: gpt-4o
  prompted_by: victoria
  reviewed_by: tech-lead
  model_version: 4o-2025-06

This makes it way easier to debug or explain later.

3. Treat bots like teammates (with guardrails)

Don’t auto-merge bot PRs
Require human signoff
Keep prompt + model logs for important changes

Why It Actually Matters

This isn’t just a Git trivia problem. It’s about:

Debugging — Who changed what, and why?
Accountability — Who’s responsible if it breaks?
Compliance — In fintech, healthtech, or enterprise software, this stuff has legal consequences