Execution, not authorship

A commit’s execution marker names the model that executed the work, without claiming that a model is an author of your research.

A commit an agent executed ends like this:

Execution-agent: <model-id>

The commit’s author is you, always.

Why a model is never an author

Authorship carries accountability, and a model cannot hold it. The publication policies the kit cites (ICMJE, COPE, Nature, Science) all say that an AI cannot be an author. So TRACE-OS never adds a Co-Authored-By: line for a model, whatever an agent’s own default says, and never a Made-by: line. A co-author line would assert exactly what those policies rule out.

A faulty default

The paper behind TRACE-OS treats the co-author line as a faulty default: a standing instruction that produced a failure. In the project that produced the paper, the agent tool added a line naming the model as a co-author by default, although the project held that a machine cannot be an author. The commit history kept those lines in view, yet keeping them did not catch the problem: a person reading the history did. The standing instructions were changed in response, and the execution marker replaced the authorship claim. The earlier commit messages were classified alongside the originals, so the error stays on the record.

The instruction does not prevent a recurrence. A check of the commit messages prints any co-authorship claim so that it is on the record, and blocks nothing.

What the execution marker claims

It names the model that ran the work: production, not authorship. It does not allocate intellectual credit. It does not say who proposed or selected a course of action.

Those choices are recorded elsewhere. An agent may propose alternatives and decide within the authority you gave it. The decision account records who proposed and who selected each consequential choice, under whose authority, and the trace record keeps those actions beside your ideas, direction and objections, in your own words.

A commit you typed

It carries no execution marker, and you need not add anything. The marker is the machine’s declaration, so its absence reads as a person’s commit.