no-ai-coauthors

no-ai-coauthors is a commit-msg hook and GitHub action.
It rejects commit messages containing AI attribution trailers like Co-authored-by: <bot>.

Important

AI co-author git-commit bylines are an impressive marketing
hook — but provide no useful signal of provenance.

It is mid-2026. All code written is facilitated by a host of
sophisticated tools. The most recent of these are AI 'co-authors'.
These have incredible utility, but as with the other tools in the
development toolchain they are not meaningfully accountable for
their output.

At best, tagging the bot used to generate code as a 'co-author'
in a commit messages adds noise to the single most important
accountability and attribution mechanism in the development
hierarchy.
At worst the practice implies similarly diffused responsibility.

As much as the act of code authorship is changing, the social rules for
authorship must not slip: we are responsible for our contributions.
The 'author' is, as ever, the contributing person.

Remove corporate spam from commit messages. No AI co-authors.

The hook is a POSIX sh script using awk, so it does not need Python, Node, Ruby, or a managed hook environment.

Public repository URL:

https://github.com/GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors

Use the 1.0.0 tag for repeatable installation from the public URL.

pre-commit

Add the hook repo to .pre-commit-config.yaml:

default_install_hook_types: [pre-commit, commit-msg]
repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors
    rev: 1.0.0
    hooks:
      - id: no-ai-coauthors

Then install the commit-msg hook:

pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg

If default_install_hook_types includes commit-msg, pre-commit install is enough.

prek

prek can consume the same .pre-commit-config.yaml. A native prek.toml entry looks like this:

default_install_hook_types = ["pre-commit", "commit-msg"]

[[repos]]
repo = "https://github.com/GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors"
rev = "1.0.0"
hooks = [{ id = "no-ai-coauthors" }]

Install the commit-msg hook:

prek install --hook-type commit-msg

If default_install_hook_types includes commit-msg, prek install is enough.

Lefthook

This repo includes a root lefthook.yml and .lefthook/commit-msg/no-ai-coauthors so it can be used as a Lefthook remote config:

remotes:
  - git_url: https://github.com/GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors
    ref: 1.0.0
    configs:
      - lefthook.yml

Then run:

lefthook install

GitHub Actions

Use the repo directly as a composite action:

name: no-ai-coauthors

on:
  pull_request:
  push:

jobs:
  no-ai-coauthors:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      pull-requests: read
    steps:
      - uses: GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors@1.0.0

On push, the action checks commit messages from the GitHub event payload and does not require checkout. On pull_request, it reads the pull request commit list through the GitHub API. If that API lookup is not available, it falls back to the local git range base.sha..head.sha, which requires checkout with enough history.

You can also provide an explicit local range:

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v5
    with:
      fetch-depth: 0
  - uses: GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors@1.0.0
    with:
      commit-range: origin/main..HEAD

Action inputs:

• commit-message-file: check one commit-message file.
• commit-range: check messages from a local git revision range.
• github-token: token for reading pull request commits. Defaults to the workflow token.
• fail-on-empty: whether to fail if no messages are found. Defaults to true.

Plain Git

Download the public hook script and configure Git's core.hooksPath:

mkdir -p .githooks
curl -fsSL \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors/1.0.0/hooks/no-ai-coauthors \
  -o .githooks/commit-msg
chmod +x .githooks/commit-msg
git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Replace 1.0.0 with a newer released tag when you upgrade.

Husky and simple-git-hooks

The package exposes a no-ai-coauthors bin for Node-oriented hook managers.

With Husky, .husky/commit-msg can contain:

no-ai-coauthors "$1"

With simple-git-hooks, use:

{
  "simple-git-hooks": {
    "commit-msg": "no-ai-coauthors \"$1\""
  }
}

Direct use

curl -fsSL \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GoodHatsLLC/no-ai-coauthors/1.0.0/hooks/no-ai-coauthors \
  -o /tmp/no-ai-coauthors
chmod +x /tmp/no-ai-coauthors
/tmp/no-ai-coauthors .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG

Development

sh tests/run.sh
pre-commit validate-manifest .pre-commit-hooks.yaml