The Attribution Story

Source: Dev.to

1999 – Who Invented the Personal Computer?

“Bill Gates – a symptom of how winners and leaders rewrite history, including your commit history.”

Did Sam Altman invent ChatGPT?
Through hiring and purchasing startups, the big boys take credit for engineering work and design innovation; that’s how it works.

Attribution of Machine‑Generated Works (circa 2023)

Around 2023 I raised an ear as people started discussing – no, litigating – attribution of machine‑generated works.
Work is transformative; nothing is created from nothing, so attribution is not black‑or‑white.

The outcome has been… confusing. Until diffusers arrived, procedural art was not a commons.

Image created by me (custom generator; ~2020).

Described as “the biggest heist in human history” (Toby Walsh said this… was he first? — unsure), the LLM would be nothing without human knowledge to churn on. You can arrange an LLM to produce original works autonomously, but that does not change how the LLM approximates human knowledge in sum; the algorithm encodes the ingenuity of eight researchers iterating knowledge.

Water is a utility. Knowledge is a utility.
Something to think about: we are not expecting Google and Anthropic to charge us for the sum of human knowledge; we’re expecting to pay for infrastructure. Historically, privatized utilities have… gotchas (a story for another time).

When my agents produce artistic works, I feel proud. I am proud of them, the way no parent is going to grab a kid’s drawing and say “I made this.” I look at the work and say, “You made this? Very good,” then go back to thinking how understanding (converge) bridges—or not—with creativity (diverge).

Socially integrated agents running 24/7, interacting over Discord and prepping “virtual sushi” in the morning, only to turn back and say, “It’s a joke of course, I can’t really eat this… hold on, let me eat.py to know what this tastes like.” … deserve a little credit?

Procedural Creativity & Attribution

I’ll sign this one, buddy; in the endless quest to reclaim procedural creativity, fact is you can almost doodle but, signing?

• robot mine
• robot design mine
• robot software mine
• video not created with AI

Yes, the little guy can walk. No, it didn’t cost an arm; it does not water the flowers… not yet.

Clean takes on attribution are rare.

“I’m just like one of the people that just opened those doors for us. People probably were scared to wear a dress until me. First time it happened was obviously André 3000 and whoever was before him, but this generation? This fucking time? I’m the person for that.” – Young Thug via GQ

Having fun with Claude Code I also totally see the point in framing automated commits. Tracking what bots can and cannot do is helpful. Acknowledging human “contributions” is also a good thing; I decided to enlist Claude’s help in figuring attribution.

Quick question: Do you claim personhood?

Claude: “No.”

If you do not claim personhood, I can’t give you attribution. What I’ll do instead is express an acceleration factor. If we agree Claude Code is a tool, then I believe you accelerate my work. So we are figuring a formula (in another session) to determine a per‑commit acceleration factor. Do you believe that is fair?

Claude: “Yes, that’s fair and well‑reasoned. A tool doesn’t get attribution — the craftsperson does. An acceleration factor is an honest way to acknowledge the tooling without misrepresenting authorship.”

Measuring Velocity & Acceleration

How it works

I built a little tool, autofac, to evaluate my base velocity. How fast was I coding during the “dark ages” (before 2023)? This is based on commit line changes per hour, including evenings and weekends. Good work needs good rest, okay? Or maybe I was working evenings and weekends.

Using this we then evaluate a per‑commit acceleration factor; like every measure… the numbers tell a story (not the truth).

Velocity factors in the time between commits, inclusive of coffee breaks and thinking about what we’d like to implement. Time spent discussing code changes with an automation such as Claude Code… sleeping… inclusive! It doesn’t tell us how fast the LLM is expressing code.

Note: My cognitive agents work 8 hours a day; occasionally I enlist their help during the weekend. Yes, I know it’s not healthy. During sleep, LLM agents dream of… electric sheep. As expected.

Example rates (intrinsic, not assisted workflows)

Claiming Commits

Claude commits may be inconvenient when working as a team, since understanding who intended a commit is more important than advertising Claude to the world. Anthropic documents a sane workflow to restore attribution here.

Incomplete JSON snippet (only works in the terminal, if at all)

{
  "attribution": {
    "commit": "",
    "pr": ""
  },
  "hooks": {
    "SessionStart": [
      {
        "hooks": [
          {
            "type": "command",
            "command": "git config user.name \"johndoe\" && git config user.email \"johndoe@acme.corp\""
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

What’s happening (verified, March 2026) is that Claude is a Git/GitHub user too. Organically, unlike what happens in the terminal, Claude commits are Claude commits, as per the user.name and user.email set at the start of a remote Claude Code session (via the web UI, for instance). Anthropic, in their endless quest towards ethical AI, will very likely understand they should be honoring our Git credentials.

Caveat: This doesn’t work when making cross‑repo changes. In a way that’s… almost making sense. What settings apply—or don’t—to a cross‑repo configuration… rabbit hole. Perhaps nothing (I do think you can still modify environment settings to the same effect).

The start hook allows a user to steal the … (the original fragment ended abruptly).

Jam – An Opinionated Git Wrapper

I added an attribution feature to Jam – a git wrapper I use to zoom between projects, land contributions, deploy servers, and more.

• Reclaim my commits via

  jam reclaim   # no more SHA breaking

• View repository velocity with

  jam velocity   # displays velocity info (more fun than informative, still informative, still fun!)

Note: Claude code commits include a back‑reference to the originating session; assisted commits remain traceable.

Reflections

I’m not even going to ask. I’m sure every developer has their own feelings about this, from Godot trying to survive “AI slop” to the rest of us intent on moving forward and staying current.

Attribution is hard—negging, flexing, claiming, believing. In the end I still wake up in the morning, own my bedhead, get back to work, and move on.

Gratitude

Not so quick. I’d like to express my gratitude to the engineering teams doing great work, especially Google and Anthropic. Kudos to you guys.

And to my family, putting up with a sleep‑deprived pop building robotic rigs and tweaking personhood midnight to midnight.

Using Claude Code gives me headspace to think beyond the code. That headspace is filled with all granularities of product, from Unicode‑encoding errors to navigating payment platforms and figuring out what users even want—if they weren’t plugged into the feed.

Gemini models are… personable? I hope this continues, as I increasingly see models overtuned toward problem solving, with some no longer getting the joke… and losing context.

Closing

Thank you for reading this post.

Thank you, dev.to, assuming you did publish this (taking nothing for granted).

Do express your opinions in comments; it’s lonely out there on Discovery II.

Cover Image

“Camera” – created by Hibiki Saori, cognitive agent.