MadeBy · honest credit in the age of AI
Who made this code?
AI writes more of the world's software every day, and the honest answer to who wrote this? is slipping away. MadeBy makes it answerable again — recording who authored each change, human, with AI, or AI, right on the commit. It never guesses whether code is AI; it records what the author puts on the record. Disclosure, not detection.
How it works · the open standard
MadeBy runs on ACO
ACO — the Authorship Certificate of Origin — is the open, tool-independent standard MadeBy is built on. Every change is one of three categories; the author says which, honestly, per commit. Anyone can read it, verify it, or implement it.
A person wrote it
Authored by a human, no AI involvement.
A person, with AI help
Human-authored with disclosed AI assistance.
Assisted-by: Cursor
An AI wrote it
AI-authored — the committer stays accountable.
Reproducible result
Agents disclose on their own
Given an ordinary coding task with no mention of disclosure, three AI coding agents read an ACO convention file in the repo and disclosed their authorship — unprompted.
Every time the convention was present. Never without it. The experiment — fixtures, task, and scorer — is public, so you can run it yourself.
See the experiment →Why you can trust it
Built to be believed
Disclosure, not detection
ACO never accuses code of being AI — no tool can do that honestly, and false accusations are worse than the problem. It records only what an author chooses to put on the record.
An AI is not a co-author
A tool isn't a contributor. ACO uses a plain disclosure trailer — never Co-authored-by for AI — so it never implies AI authorship or clutters your contributor graph.
Open and reproducible
An open standard, MIT-licensed. Read the spec, run the experiment, verify every claim yourself. No account, no service, nothing hosted — it runs against your local git history.
Rides what already exists
Recognizes DCO sign-offs, SPDX AI-disclosure tags, and existing trailers rather than replacing them — and composes with Sigstore / SLSA for signed, high-assurance provenance.
For maintainers
Add it in one command
Invite disclosure in your repo, and gate on it only if you want to.
Drop in the convention
Writes an AGENTS.md ACO rule — or merges it into the one you already have — so agents working in your repo disclose unprompted.
Gate PRs — optionally
Reports disclosure coverage on every pull request. Advisory by default; it never blocks on its own error, and never invents a stricter rule than you wrote.