Hacker News

I think the motivation is to let developers use it for work without making it obvious theyre using AI

> my first knee-jerk reaction wouldn't be "this is for pretending to be human"...

"Write commit messages as a human developer would — describe only what the code change does."

Undercover mode seems like a way to make contributions to OSS when they detect issues, without accidentally leaking that it was claude-mythos-gigabrain-100000B that figured out the issue

I would have expected people (maybe a small minority, but that includes myself) to have already instructed Claude to do this. It’s a trivial instruction to add to your CLAUDE.md file.

Ive seen it say coauthored by claude code on my prs...and I agree I dont want it to do that

It's less about pretending to be a human and more about not inviting scrutiny and ridicule toward Claude if the code quality is bad. They want the real human to appear to be responsible for accepting Claud's poor output.

You can already turn off "Co-Authored-By" via Claude Code config. This is what their docs show:

~/.claude/settings.json

    {
      "attribution": {
        "commit": "",
        "pr": ""
    },

Claude Code users aren't the ones worried about leaking "internal model codenames" nor "unreleased model opus-4-8" nor Slack channel names. Though, nobody would want that crap in their generated docs/code anyways.

Seems like a nothingburger, and everyone seems to be fantasizing about "undercover mode" rather than engaging with the details.

It's people overreacting, the purpose of it is simple, don't leak any codenames, project names, file names, etc when touching external / public facing code that you are maintaining using bleeding edge versions of Claude Code. It does read weird in that they want it to write as if a developer wrote a commit, but it might be to avoid it outputting debug information in a commit message.

Even some of these comments are obviously Ai-assisted. I hate that I recognize it.

Comments are the ultimate agent coding hack. If you're not using comments, you're doing agent coding wrong.

Why? Agents may or may not read docs. It may or may not use skills or tools. It will always read comments "in the line of sight" of the task.

You get free long term agent memory with zero infrastructure.

I guess they weren't expecting a leak of the source code? It's very handy to have as much as possible available in the codebase itself.

well yeah since they tell claude code the business decisions and it creates the comments

Project trackers come and go, but code is forever, hopefully?

You didn't even use it yet.

Oh right, I just saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582220 will update the post with this link

What version?

technically you're correct, but look at the prompt https://github.com/alex000kim/claude-code/blob/main/src/util...

it's written to _actively_ avoid any signs of AI generated code when "in a PUBLIC/OPEN-SOURCE repository".

Also, it's not about you. Undercover mode only activates for Anthropic employees (it's gated on USER_TYPE === 'ant', which is a build-time flag baked into internal builds).

I think it means OSS projects should start unilaterally banning submissions from people working for Anthropic.

It's possible, but Anthropic employees regularly boast (!) that Claude Code is itself almost entirely vibe-coded (which certainly seems true, based on the generally-low quality of the code in this leak), so it wouldn't at all surprise me to have that blow up twice in the same week. Probably it might happen with accelerating frequency as the codebase gets more and more unmanageable.

I'm normally suspicious but honestly they've been so massively supply-constrained that I don't think it really benefits them much. They're not worried about getting enough demand for the new models; they're worrying about keeping up with it.

Granted, there's a small counterargument for mythos which is that it's probably going to be API-only not subscription

why