🏗️🔧：keep a tool out of the author credit

[DerekNonGeneric]

Summary

The handbook has always said Co-authored-by: is for people and that an assistant belongs in Assisted-by: instead. Nothing checked it, and a commit crediting a model as a co-author got as far as an open pull request this week.

That is not a formatting slip. Authorship is a claim only a person can make: the Developer Certificate of Origin is certified by whoever wrote the code, and a tool certifies nothing. Assisted-by: says what was used. Co-authored-by: says who is answerable, and a model cannot be.

Why a check and not a review note

An agent writing its own commit message reaches for that trailer out of habit, because most of the code it learnt from does. A reviewer reading a long message is exactly who does not notice one line at the bottom. Once it lands it is in the history for good.

What it refuses

A Co-authored-by: whose value matches an assistant's address, a [bot] account, or one of the agent product names that reach this project.

“Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>” credits a tool with
authorship: an assistant is disclosed with “Assisted-by:” and co-authors nothing

It refuses on three things: the [bot] suffix, which GitHub reserves so that no person can hold it; the addresses the agents commit under, which are theirs alone and not the ones their staff use; and a handful of product names. Only the last can reach a person, and realistically only claude, which is also a name people have. That is the trade, and if it ever refuses a real co-author the pattern gets narrowed rather than the credit dropped.

An agent whose integration commits as a [bot] account needs no name in the list, which is why Devin and Gemini are absent: both are ordinary names before they are products. Renovate and Dependabot are unaffected either way, since their commits are skipped whole and never reach this check.

Validation

• six tests added: a person passes, an assistant with an address fails, one without an address fails, a [bot] account fails, and two confirming a person is not caught -- somebody at one of those companies, and somebody whose given name an agent also goes by
• confirmed end to end against a real commit carrying the exact trailer that prompted this
• full suite passes, 147 tests

The same change lands in OpenINF/sdk, which carries a copy of this module.

Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features

  • Commit-message validation now detects AI assistants and bot accounts listed in Co-authored-by trailers.
  • These attributions are rejected with guidance to use Assisted-by instead.
  • Human co-authors—including names that overlap with known assistant names—remain accepted.

• Documentation

  • Added guidance for correctly crediting AI assistance and correcting inaccurate authorship entries.

• Tests

  • Expanded coverage for valid human co-authors and rejected assistant or bot attributions.

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[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Essentials

Run ID: 3ad23457-a8f1-4e91-b53a-af7ea93f857e

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 4949736 and b48e622.

📒 Files selected for processing (3)

• build/shared/commit-message.mts
• build/shared/commit-message.test.mts
• collections/_docs/handbook/style/commit-messages.md

Included review availability: 1 review is currently available. Your included PR review attempts over the past 7 days set your current allowance at 5 reviews per hour.

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The commit-message validator now rejects assistant and bot identities in Co-authored-by trailers. Tests cover valid human entries and rejected tool identities. Documentation directs contributors to use Assisted-by for tool disclosure.

Changes

Co-author trailer validation

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Tool co-author detection and enforcement build/shared/commit-message.mts	Adds matching for bot markers, selected AI email domains, and known assistant names. Rejects matching Co-authored-by values and directs disclosure through Assisted-by.
Validation coverage and contributor guidance build/shared/commit-message.test.mts, collections/_docs/handbook/style/commit-messages.md	Adds tests for human, assistant, bot, and overlapping human names. Documents the validation rule and guidance for false-positive name matches.

Priority: ⬇️ Low

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Change: Feature

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to b48e6

The validator, tests, and contributor guidance align for the documented assistant and bot trailer cases.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 2…
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description Check	✅ Passed	Check skipped - CodeRabbit’s high-level summary is enabled.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title describes the main change: preventing tools from receiving author credit. It is related to the commit trailer validation changes, although it does not name Co-authored-by: or `Assisted-by:…

✨ Finishing Touches

📝 Generate docstrings

• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch infra/refuse-tool-coauthor

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